CHAPTER XXXI
When she was alone Joan sat and gazed not at her wall but at the
pictures that came back to her out of a part of her life which seemed
to have been lived centuries ago. They were the pictures that came
back continually without being called, the clearness of which always
startled her afresh. Sometimes she thought they sprang up to add to
her torment, but sometimes it seemed as if they came to save her from
herself--her mad, wicked self. After all, there were moments when to
know that she had been the girl whose eighteen-year-old heart had
leaped so when she turned and met Jem's eyes, as he stood gazing at
her under the beech-tree, was something to cling to. She had been that
girl and Jem had been--Jem. And she had been the girl who had joined
him in that young, ardent vow that they would say the same prayers at
the same hour each night together. Ah! how young it had been--how
YOUNG! Her throat strained itself because sobs rose in it, and her
eyes were hot with the swell of tears.
She could hear voices and laughter and the click of balls from the
billiard-room. Her mother and Palliser laughed the most, but she knew
the sound of her mother's voice would cease soon, because she would
come back to her. She knew she would not leave her long, and she knew
the kind of scene they would pass through together when she returned.
The old things would be said, the old arguments used, but a new one
would be added. It was a pleasant thing to wait here, knowing that it
was coming, and that for all her fierce pride and fierce spirit she
had no defense. It was at once horrible and ridiculous that she must
sit and listen--and stare at the growing wall. It was as she caught
her breath against the choking swell of tears that she heard Lady
Mallowe returning. She came in with an actual sweep across the room.
Her society air had fled, and she was unadornedly furious when she
stopped before Joan's chair. For a few seconds she actually glared;
then she broke forth in a suppressed undertone:
"Come into the billiard-room. I command it!"
Joan lifted her eyes from her book. Her voice was as low as her
mother's, but steadier.
"No," she answered.
"Is this conduct to continue? Is it?" Lady Mallowe panted.
"Yes," said Joan, and laid her book on the table near her. There was
nothing else to say. Words made things worse.
Lady Mallowe had lost her head, but she still spoke in the suppressed
voice.
"You SHALL behave yourself!" she cried, under her breath, and actually
made a passionate half-start toward her. "You violent-natured virago!
The very look on your face is enough to drive one mad!"
"I know I am violent-natured," said Joan. "But don't you think it wise
to remember that you cannot make the kind of scene here that you can
in your own house? We are a bad-tempered pair, and we behave rather
like fishwives when we are in a rage. But when we are guests in other
people's houses--"
Lady Mallowe's temper was as elemental as any Billingsgate could
provide.
"You think you can take advantage of that!" she said. "Don't trust
yourself too far. Do you imagine that just when all might go well for
me I will allow you to spoil everything?"
"How can I spoil everything?"
"By behaving as you have been behaving since we came here--refusing to
make a home for yourself; by hanging round my neck so that it will
appear that any one who takes me must take you also."
"There are servants outside," Joan warned her.
"You shall not stop me!" cried Lady Mallowe.
"You cannot stop yourself," said Joan. "That is the worst of it. It is
bad enough when we stand and hiss at each other in a stage whisper;
but when you lose control over yourself and raise your voice--"
"I came in here to tell you that this is your last chance. I shall
never give you another. Do you know how old you are?"
"I shall soon be twenty-seven," Joan answered. "I wish I were a
hundred. Then it would all be over."
"But it will not be over for years and years and years," her mother
flung back at her. "Have you forgotten that the very rags you wear are
not paid for?"
"No, I have not forgotten." The scene was working itself up on the old
lines, as Joan had known it would. Her mother never failed to say the
same things, every time such a scene took place.
"You will get no more such rags--paid or unpaid for. What do you
expect to do? You don't know how to work, and if you did no decent
woman would employ you. You are too good-looking and too bad-
tempered."
Joan knew she was perfectly right. Knowing it, she remained silent,
and her silence added to her mother's helpless rage. She moved a step
nearer to her and flung the javelin which she always knew would strike
deep.
"You have made yourself a laughing-stock for all London for years. You
are mad about a man who disgraced and ruined himself."
She saw the javelin quiver as it struck; but Joan's voice as it
answered her had a quality of low and deadly steadiness.
"You have said that a thousand times, and you will say it another
thousand--though you know the story was a lie and was proved to be
one."
Lady Mallowe knew her way thoroughly.
"Who remembers the denials? What the world remembers is that Jem
Temple Barholm was stamped as a cheat and a trickster. No one has time
to remember the other thing. He is dead--dead! When a man's dead it's
too late."
She was desperate enough to drive her javelin home deeper than she had
ever chanced to drive it before. The truth--the awful truth she
uttered shook Joan from head to foot. She sprang up and stood before
her in heart-wrung fury.
"Oh! You are a hideously cruel woman!" she cried. "They say even
tigers care for their young! But you--you can say that to _me_. 'When
a man's dead, it's too late.'"
"It _is_ too late--it IS too late!" Lady Mallowe persisted. Why had
not she struck this note before? It was breaking her will: "I would
say anything to bring you to your senses."
Joan began to move restlessly to and fro.
"Oh, what a fool I am!" she exclaimed. "As if you could understand--as
if you could care!"
Struggle as she might to be defiant, she was breaking, Lady Mallowe
repeated to herself. She followed her as a hunter might have followed
a young leopardess with a wound in its flank.
"I came here because it _is_ your last chance. Palliser knew what he
was saying when he made a joke of it just now. He knew it wasn't a
joke. You might have been the Duchess of Merthshire; you might have
been Lady St. Maur, with a husband with millions. And here you are.
You know what's before you--when I am out of the trap."
Joan laughed. It was a wild little laugh, and she felt there was no
sense in it.
"I might apply for a place in Miss Alicia's Home for Decayed
Gentlewomen," she said.
Lady Mallowe nodded her head fiercely.
"Apply, then. There will be no place for you in the home I am going to
live in," she retorted.
Joan ceased moving about. She was about to hear the one argument that
was new.
"You may as well tell me," she said, wearily.
"I have had a letter from Sir Moses Monaldini. He is to be at Broome
Haughton. He is going there purposely to meet me. What he writes can
mean only one thing. He means to ask me to marry him. I'm your mother,
and I'm nearly twenty years older than you; but you see that I'm out
of the trap first."
"I knew you would be," answered Joan.
"He detests you," Lady Mallowe went on. "He will not hear of your
living with us--or even near us. He says you are old enough to take
care of yourself. Take my advice. I am doing you a good turn in giving
it. This New York newsboy is mad over you. If he hadn't been we should
have been bundled out of the house before this. He never has spoken to
a lady before in his life, and he feels as if you were a goddess. Go
into the billiard-room this instant, and do all a woman can. Go!" And
she actually stamped her foot on the carpet.
Joan's thunder-colored eyes seemed to grow larger as she stared at
her. Her breast lifted itself, and her face slowly turned pale.
Perhaps--she thought it wildly--people sometimes did die of feelings
like this.
"He would crawl at your feet," her mother went on, pursuing what she
felt sure was her advantage. She was so sure of it that she added
words only a fool or a woman half hysteric with rage would have added.
"You might live in the very house you would have lived in with Jem
Temple Barholm, on the income he could have given you."
She saw the crassness of her blunder the next moment. If she had had
an advantage, she had lost it. Wickedly, without a touch of mirth,
Joan laughed in her face.
"Jem's house and Jem's money--and the New York newsboy in his shoes,"
she flung at her. "T. Tembarom to live with until one lay down on
one's deathbed. T. Tembarom!"
Suddenly, something was giving way in her, Lady Mallowe thought again.
Joan slipped into a chair and dropped her head and hidden face on the
table.
"Oh! Mother! Mother!" she ended. "Oh! Jem! Jem!"
Was she sobbing or trying to choke sobbing back? There was no time to
be lost. Her mother had never known a scene to end in this way before.
"Crying!" there was absolute spite in her voice. "That shows you know
what you are in for, at all events. But I've said my last word. What
does it matter to me, after all? You're in the trap. I'm not. Get out
as best you can. I've done with you."
She turned her back and went out of the room--as she had come into it-
-with a sweep Joan would have smiled at as rather vulgar if she had
seen it. As a child in the nursery, she had often seen that her
ladyship was vulgar.
But she did not see the sweep because her face was hidden. Something
in her had broken this time, as her mother had felt. That bitter,
sordid truth, driven home as it had been, had done it. Who had time to
remember denials, or lies proved to be lies? Nobody in the world. Who
had time to give to the defense of a dead man? There was not time
enough to give to living ones. It was true--true! When a man is dead,
it is too late. The wall had built itself until it reached her sky;
but it was not the wall she bent her head and sobbed over. It was that
suddenly she had seen again Jem's face as he had stood with slow-
growing pallor, and looked round at the ring of eyes which stared at
him; Jem's face as he strode by her without a glance and went out of
the room. She forgot everything else on earth. She forgot where she
was. She was eighteen again, and she sobbed in her arms as eighteen
sobs when its heart is torn from it.
"Oh Jem! Jem!" she cried. "If you were only in the same world with me!
If you were just in the same world!"
She had forgotten all else, indeed. She forgot too long. She did not
know how long. It seemed that no more than a few minutes had passed
before she was without warning struck with the shock of feeling that
some one was in the room with her, standing near her, looking at her.
She had been mad not to remember that exactly this thing would be sure
to happen, by some abominable chance. Her movement as she rose was
almost violent, she could not hold herself still, and her face was
horribly wet with shameless, unconcealable tears. Shameless she felt
them--indecent--a sort of nudity of the soul. If it had been a servant
who had intruded, or if it had been Palliser it would have been
intolerable enough. But it was T. Tembarom who confronted her with his
common face, moved mysteriously by some feeling she resented even more
than she resented his presence. He was too grossly ignorant to know
that a man of breeding, having entered by chance, would have turned
and gone away, professing not to have seen. He seemed to think--the
dolt!--that he must make some apology.
"Say! Lady Joan!" he began. "I beg your pardon. I didn't want to butt
in."
"Then go away," she commanded. "Instantly--instantly!"
She knew he must see that she spoke almost through her teeth in her
effort to control her sobbing breath. But he made no move toward
leaving her. He even drew nearer, looking at her in a sort of
meditative, obstinate way.
"N-no," he replied, deliberately. "I guess--I won't."
"You won't?" Lady Joan repeated after him. "Then I will."
He made a stride forward and laid his hand on her arm.
"No. Not on your life. You won't, either--if I can help it. And you're
going to LET me help it."
Almost any one but herself--any one, at least, who did not resent his
very existence--would have felt the drop in his voice which suddenly
struck the note of boyish, friendly appeal in the last sentence.
"You're going to LET me," he repeated.
She stood looking down at the daring, unconscious hand on her arm.
"I suppose," she said, with cutting slowness, "that you do not even
_know_ that you are insolent. Take your hand away," in arrogant
command.
He removed it with an unabashed half-smile.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I didn't even know I'd put it there. It
was a break--but I wanted to keep you."
That he not only wanted to keep her, but intended to do so was
apparent. His air was neither rough nor brutal, but he had ingeniously
placed himself in the outlet between the big table and the way to the
door. He put his hands in his pockets in his vulgar, unconscious way,
and watched her.
"Say, Lady Joan!" he broke forth, in the frank outburst of a man who
wants to get something over. "I should be a fool if I didn't see that
you're up against it--hard! What's the matter?" His voice dropped
again.
There was something in the drop this time which--perhaps because of
her recent emotion--sounded to her almost as if he were asking the
question with the protecting sympathy of the tone one would use in
speaking to a child. How dare he! But it came home to her that Jem had
once said "What's the matter?" to her in the same way.
"Do you think it likely that I should confide in you?" she said, and
inwardly quaked at the memory as she said it.
"No," he answered, considering the matter gravely. "It's not likely--
the way things look to you now. But if you knew me better perhaps it
would be likely."
"I once explained to you that I do not intend to know you better," she
gave answer.
He nodded acquiescently.
"Yes. I got on to that. And it's because it's up to me that I came out
here to tell you something I want you to know before you go away. I'm
going to confide in you."
"Cannot even you see that I am not in the mood to accept confidences?"
she exclaimed.
"Yes, I can. But you're going to accept this one," steadily. "No," as
she made a swift movement, "I'm not going to clear the way till I've
done."
"I insist!" she cried. "If you were--"
He put out his hand, but not to touch her.
"I know what you're going to say. If I were a gentleman--Well, I'm not
laying claim to that--but I'm a sort of a man, anyhow, though you
mayn't think it. And you're going to listen."
She began to stare at him. It was not the ridiculous boyish drop in
his voice which arrested her attention. It was a fantastic,
incongruous, wholly different thing. He had suddenly dropped his
slouch and stood upright. Did he realize that he had slung his words
at her as if they were an order given with the ring of authority?
"I've not bucked against anything you've said or done since you've
been here," he went on, speaking fast and grimly. "I didn't mean to. I
had my reasons. There were things that I'd have given a good deal to
say to you and ask you about, but you wouldn't let me. You wouldn't
give me a chance to square things for you--if they could be squared.
You threw me down every time I tried!"
He was too wildly incomprehensible with his changes from humanness to
folly. Remembering what he had attempted to say on the day he had
followed her in the avenue, she was inflamed again.
"What in the name of New York slang does that mean?" she demanded.
"Never mind New York," he answered, cool as well as grim. "A fellow
that's learned slang in the streets has learned something else as
well. He's learned to keep his eyes open. He's on to a way of seeing
things. And what I've seen is that you're so doggone miserable that--
that you're almost down and out."
This time she spoke to him in the voice with the quality of deadliness
in it which she had used to her mother.
"Do you think that because you are in your own house you can be as
intrusively insulting as you choose?" she said.
"No, I don't," he answered. "What I think is quite different. I think
that if a man has a house of his own, and there's any one in big
trouble under the roof of it--a woman most of all--he's a cheap skate
if he don't get busy and try to help--just plain, straight help."
He saw in her eyes all her concentrated disdain of him, but he went
on, still obstinate and cool and grim.
"I guess 'help' is too big a word just yet. That may come later, and
it mayn't. What I'm going to try at now is making it easier for you--
just easier."
Her contemptuous gesture registered no impression on him as he paused
a moment and looked fixedly at her.
"You just hate me, don't you?" It was a mere statement which couldn't
have been more impersonal to himself if he had been made of wood.
"That's all right. I seem like a low-down intruder to you. Well,
that's all right, too. But what ain't all right is what your mother
has set you on to thinking about me. You'd never have thought it
yourself. You'd have known better."
"What," fiercely, "is that?"
"That I'm mutt enough to have a mash on you."
The common slangy crassness of it was a kind of shock. She caught her
breath and merely stared at him. But he was not staring at her; he was
simply looking straight into her face, and it amazingly flashed upon
her that the extraordinary words were so entirely unembarrassed and
direct that they were actually not offensive.
He was merely telling her something in his own way, not caring the
least about his own effect, but absolutely determined that she should
hear and understand it.
Her caught breath ended in something which was like a half-laugh. His
queer, sharp, incomprehensible face, his queer, unmoved voice were too
extraordinarily unlike anything she had ever seen or heard before.
"I don't want to be brash--and what I want to say may seem kind of
that way to you. But it ain't. Anyhow, I guess it'll relieve your
mind. Lady Joan, you're a looker--you're a beaut from Beautville. If I
were your kind, and things were different, I'd be crazy about you--
crazy! But I'm not your kind--and things are different." He drew a
step nearer still to her in his intentness. "They're this different.
Why, Lady Joan! I'm dead stuck on another girl!"
She caught her breath again, leaning forward.
"Another--!"
"She says she's not a lady; she threw me down just because all this
darned money came to me," he hastened on, and suddenly he was
imperturbable no longer, but flushed and boyish, and more of New York
than ever. "She's a little bit of a quiet thing and she drops her h's,
but gee--! You're a looker --you're a queen and she's not. But Little
Ann Hutchinson-- Why, Lady Joan, as far as this boy's concerned"--and
he oddly touched himself on the breast--"she makes you look like
thirty cents."
Joan quickly sat down on the chair she had just left. She rested an
elbow on the table and shaded her face with her hand. She was not
laughing; she scarcely knew what she was doing or feeling.
"You are in love with Ann Hutchinson," she said, in a low voice.
"Am I?" he answered hotly. "Well, I should smile!" He disdained to say
more.
Then she began to know what she felt. There came back to her in
flashes scenes from the past weeks in which she had done her worst by
him; in which she had swept him aside, loathed him, set her feet on
him, used the devices of an ingenious demon to discomfit and show him
at his poorest and least ready. And he had not been giving a thought
to the thing for which she had striven to punish him. And he plainly
did not even hate her. His mind was clear, as water is clear. He had
come back to her this evening to do her a good turn--a good turn.
Knowing what she was capable of in the way of arrogance and villainous
temper, he had determined to do her--in spite of herself--a good turn.
"I don't understand you," she faltered.
"I know you don't. But it's only because I'm so dead easy to
understand. There's nothing to find out. I'm just friendly --friendly-
-that's all."
"You would have been friends with me! " she exclaimed. "You would have
told me, and I wouldn't let you! Oh!" with an impulsive flinging out
of her hand to him, "you good --good fellow!"
"Good be darned! " he answered, taking the hand at once.
"You are good to tell me! I have behaved like a devil to you. But oh!
if you only knew!"
His face became mature again; but he took a most informal seat on the
edge of the table near her.
"I do know--part of it. That's why I've been trying to be friends with
you all the time." He said his next words deliberately. "If I was the
woman Jem Temple Barholm had loved wouldn't it have driven me mad to
see another man in his place--and remember what was done to him. I
never even saw him, but, good God! "--she saw his hand clench itself--
"when I think of it I want to kill somebody! I want to kill half a
dozen. Why didn't they know it couldn't be true of a fellow like that!"
She sat up stiffly and watched him.
"Do--you--feel like that--about him?"
"Do I!" red-hotly. "There were men there that knew him! There were
women there that knew him! Why wasn't there just one to stand by him?
A man that's been square all his life doesn't turn into a card-sharp
in a night. Damn fools! I beg your pardon," hastily. And then, as
hastily again: "No, I mean it. Damn fools!"
"Oh!" she gasped, just once.
Her passionate eyes were suddenly blinded with tears. She caught at
his clenched hand and dragged it to her, letting her face drop on it
and crying like a child.
The way he took her utter breaking down was just like him and like no
one else. He put the other hand on her shoulder and spoke to her
exactly as he had spoken to Miss Alicia on that first afternoon.
"Don't you mind me, Lady Joan," he said. "Don't you mind me a bit.
I'll turn my back. I'll go into the billiard- room and keep them
playing until you get away up-stairs. Now we understand each other,
it'll be better for both of us."
"No, don't go! Don't!" she begged. "It is so wonderful to find some
one who sees the cruelty of it." She spoke fast and passionately. "No
one would listen to any defense of him. My mother simply raved when I
said what you are saying."
"Do you want "--he put it to her with a curious comprehending of her
emotion--"to talk about him? Would it do you good?"
"Yes! Yes! I have never talked to any one. There has been no one to
listen."
"Talk all you want," he answered, with immense gentleness. "I'm here."
"I can't understand it even now, but he would not see me!" she broke
out. "I was half mad. I wrote, and he would not answer. I went to his
chambers when I heard he was going to leave England. I went to beg him
to take me with him, married or unmarried. I would have gone on my
knees to him. He was gone! Oh, why? Why?"
"You didn't think he'd gone because he didn't love you?" he put it to
her quite literally and unsentimentally. "You knew better than that?"
"How could I be sure of anything! When he left the room that awful
night he would not look at me! He would not look at me!"
"Since I've been here I've been reading a lot of novels, and I've
found out a lot of things about fellows that are not the common,
practical kind. Now, he wasn't. He'd lived pretty much like a fellow
in a novel, I guess. What's struck me about that sort is that they
think they have to make noble sacrifices, and they'll just walk all
over a woman because they won't do anything to hurt her. There's not a
bit of sense in it, but that was what he was doing. He believed he was
doing the square thing by you--and you may bet your life it hurt him
like hell. I beg your pardon--but that's the word--just plain hell."
"I was only a girl. He was like iron. He went away alone. He was
killed, and when he was dead the truth was told."
"That's what I've remembered "--quite slowly--"every time I've looked
at you. By gee! I'd have stood anything from a woman that had suffered
as much as that."
It made her cry--his genuineness--and she did not care in the least
that the tears streamed down her cheeks. How he had stood things! How
he had borne, in that odd, unimpressive way, insolence and arrogance
for which she ought to have been beaten and blackballed by decent
society! She could scarcely bear it.
"Oh! to think it should have been you," she wept, "just you who
understood!"
"Well," he answered speculatively, "I mightn't have understood as well
if it hadn't been for Ann. By jings! I used to lie awake at night
sometimes thinking `supposing it bad been Ann and me!' I'd sort of
work it out as it might have happened in New York--at the office of
the Sunday Earth. Supposing some fellow that'd had a grouch against me
had managed it so that Galton thought I'd been getting away with money
that didn't belong to me--fixing up my expense account, or worse. And
Galton wouldn't listen to what I said, and fired me; and I couldn't
get a job anywhere else because I was down and out for good. And
nobody would listen. And I was killed without clearing myself. And
Little Ann was left to stand it--Little Ann! Old Hutchinson wouldn't
listen, I know that. And it would be all shut up burning in her big
little heart--burning. And T. T. dead, and not a word to say for
himself. Jehoshaphat!"--taking out his handkerchief and touching his
forehead--"it used to make the cold sweat start out on me. It's doing
it now. Ann and me might have been Jem and you. That's why I
understood."
He put out his hand and caught hers and frankly squeezed it--squeezed
it hard; and the unconventional clutch was a wonderful thing to her.
"It's all right now, ain't it?" he said. "We've got it straightened
out. You'll not be afraid to come back here if your mother wants you
to." He stopped for a moment and then went on with something of
hesitation: "We don't want to talk about your mother. We can't. But I
understand her, too. Folks are different from each other in their
ways. She's different from you. I'll--I'll straighten it out with her
if you like."
"Nothing will need straightening out after I tell her that you are
going to marry Little Ann Hutchinson," said Joan, with a half-smile.
"And that you were engaged to her before you saw me."
"Well, that does sort of finish things up, doesn't it?" said T.
Tembarom.
He looked at her so speculatively for a moment after this that she
wondered whether he had something more to say. He had.
"There's something I want to ask you," he ventured.
"Ask anything."
"Do you know any one--just any one--who has a photo-- just any old
photo--of Jem Temple Barholm?"
She was rather puzzled.
"Yes. I know a woman who has worn one for nearly eight years. Do you
want to see it?"
"I'd give a good deal to," was his answer.
She took a flat locket from her dress and handed it to him.
"Women don't wear lockets in these days." He could barely hear her
voice because it was so low. "But I've never taken it off. I want him
near my heart. It's Jem!"
He held it on the palm of his hand and stood under the light, studying
it as if he wanted to be sure he wouldn't forget it.
"It's--sorter like that picture of Miles Hugo, ain't it?" he
suggested.
"Yes. People always said so. That was why you found me in the picture-
gallery the first time we met."
"I knew that was the reason--and I knew I'd made a break when I butted
in," he answered. Then, still looking at the photograph, "You'd know
this face again most anywhere you saw it, I guess."
"There are no faces like it anywhere," said Joan.
"I guess that's so," he replied. "And it's one that wouldn't change
much either. Thank you, Lady Joan."
He handed back the picture, and she put out her hand again.
"I think I'll go to my room now," she said. "You've done a strange
thing to me. You've taken nearly all the hatred and bitterness out of
my heart. I shall want to come back here whether my mother comes or
not--I shall want to."
"The sooner the quicker," he said. "And so long as I'm here I'll be
ready and waiting."
"Don't go away," she said softly. "I shall need you."
"Isn't that great?" he cried, flushing delightedly. "Isn't it just
great that we've got things straightened so that you can say that.
Gee! This is a queer old world! There's such a lot to do in it, and so
few hours in the day. Seems like there ain't time to stop long enough
to hate anybody and keep a grouch on. A fellow's got to keep hustling
not to miss the things worth while."
The liking in her eyes was actually wistful.
"That's your way of thinking, isn't it?" she said. "Teach it to me if
you can. I wish you could. Good-night." She hesitated a second. "God
bless you!" she added, quite suddenly--almost fantastic as the words
sounded to her. That she, Joan Fayre, should be calling down devout
benisons on the head of T. Tembarom--T. Tembarom!
Her mother was in her room when she reached it. She had come up early
to look over her possessions--and Joan's--before she began her
packing. The bed, the chairs, and tables were spread with evening,
morning, and walking-dresses, and the millinery collected from their
combined wardrobes. She was examining anxiously a lace appliqued and
embroidered white coat, and turned a slightly flushed face toward the
opening door.
"I am going over your things as well as my own," she said. "I shall
take what I can use. You will require nothing in London. You will
require nothing anywhere in future. What is the matter?" she said
sharply, as she saw her daughter's face.
Joan came forward feeling it a strange thing that she was not in the
mood to fight--to lash out and be glad to do it.
"Captain Palliser told me as I came up that Mr. Temple Barholm had
been talking to you," her mother went on. "He heard you having some
sort of scene as he passed the door. As you have made your decision,
of course I know I needn't hope that anything has happened."
"What has happened has nothing to do with my decision. He wasn't
waiting for that," Joan answered her. "We were both entirely mistaken,
Mother."
"What are you talking about?" cried Lady Mallowe, but she temporarily
laid the white coat on a chair. "What do you mean by mistaken?"
"He doesn't want me--he never did," Joan answered again. A shadow of a
smile hovered over her face, and there was no derision in it, only a
warming recollection of his earnestness when he had said the words she
quoted: "He is what they call in New York `dead stuck on another
girl."'
Lady Mallowe sat down on the chair that held the white coat, and she
did not push the coat aside.
"He told you that in his vulgar slang!" she gasped it out. "You--you
ought to have struck him dead with your answer."
"Except poor Jem Temple Barholm," was the amazing reply she received,
"he is the only friend I ever had in my life."
