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"You recognize no difference whatever?" "None except an added link in the chain." "An added link?" "In having one more thing to like you for your letting Miss Gaynor see why I had already so many." He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase. Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. "Was it that you came for?" she asked, almost gaily.
James Underhill felt as he had sometimes in the old school days, that he had been duped. He was angry with her, with himself. He had brought his friends to the house; and he knew Weir was really in love with her, yet she had laughed daintily about some of his peculiarities. What if she had laughed with Gaynor about him? She did satirise people. It was strange how many faults he saw in her!
Then it was that the look in his eyes frightened her. But the hands gripping his were flesh-and-blood hands, and, besides, Ben Gaynor was a very matter-of-fact man, little given to prolonged fanciful ideas, even after a night of pain and mental distress. "By the Lord, we'll nail their hides to our barn door yet!" were his first words of greeting. He hitched himself up against his pillows.
King did not so much as know of the event until Gaynor, after a month of honeymooning, remembered to drop him a brief note. The bald fact jarred; King was hurt and grew angry and resentful with all of that unreason of a boy. He went off to Alaska without a word to Gaynor.
He didn't write, as the necessity of an answer did not suggest itself to him. He took it for granted that she would know that he would come. He chuckled as he thought of the birthday gift he would bring her. There was still a week; he remained with Spalding at the Gaynor mountain home and devoted hour after hour to taming the cub. On the eleventh he was in San Francisco.
"Of course I've earned quite a lot of money, meanwhile, but Gaynor keeps that as a separate checking account; says circuses and vaudeville are not a dependable source of income and that I may go broke. This Ralph Gaynor is a wonder in his line, but it's not my kind of a line. He talks of interest, margins of safety, of unearned increments, corporate earnings, and things like that.
In the first fifteen years of my life, I had never seen money, never a penny of my own. Now it was the other way. After the funeral I went down to the bank to consult with Mister Gaynor. He handed me a sealed envelope. It was a message from the dear, kind, motherly Mrs. Lannarck. It was a letter of kindly advice, personal and spiritual.
She who had never been whipped in all of her life, she whose soft white body had been held inviolate by idolizing parents, she who had come to hold her own person as sacred as that of a high princess to be beaten by a man! To be lashed across her shoulders with a horse's tie-rope. She, Gloria Gaynor, to have her bedding ripped off her, to be commanded to do a man's bidding and to be whipped!
King silenced the man with a scowl and led him and Jim into the living-room, closing the door. It was unthinkable that Gloria should hear a lot of talk about why's and how's. For Gloria, it struck him, had undergone enough for one day. "Look here," he said to Summerling then, "either you will or you won't. If you won't, then Miss Gaynor and myself will go elsewhere. Now, which is it?"
That something was wrong the girl knew, but whether it was that a valuable horse was dead, or that a mouse had eaten a hole in a grain bag she could only discover by questioning Gaynor, for there were never degrees of expressed emotion in Mike's facile countenance; either a deep scowl or a broad grin were the two normal conditions. "What's the matter, Mike?" questioned Allis.
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