“To Hotel Eyrie, Martindale Center: Dust 571 and send up seven chairs. Chester Kent.”
“Now I wonder what that might mean?” mused the day-clerk of the Eyrie, as he read the telegram through for the second time. “Convention in the Room of Mystery, maybe?”
To satisfy his curiosity he went up to the room himself. Its white bareness confirmed a suspicion of long standing.
“Any man,” he remarked to the scrub woman, “who would pay five a day for a room just to put nothing at all in it, has sure got a kink in his cogs.”
Nor did the personnel of the visitors who, in course of the late afternoon, arrived with requests to be shown to 571, serve to efface this impression. First came the sheriff from Annalaka. He was followed by a man of unmistakably African derivation, who gave the name of Jim and declined to identify himself more specifically. While the clerk was endeavoring, with signal lack of success, to pump him, Lawyer Adam Bain arrived, and so emphatically vouched for his predecessor as to leave the desk-lord no further excuse for obstructive tactics. Shortly afterward Alexander Blair came in, with a woman heavily veiled, and was deferentially conducted aloft. Finally, Chester Kent himself appeared, accompanied by Sedgwick and a third man, unknown to the clerk, pompously arrayed in frock coat and silk hat, and characterized by a painfully twitching chin.
“Who have come?” Kent asked the clerk.
That functionary ran over the list. “Looks like something to do with the woman found in Lonesome Cove last week,” he essayed hopefully.
Kent glanced out of the window. “It looks like rain,” he observed, “and it looks like wind. And it looks like a number of things that are anybody’s business. Furthermore, I may mention that we shall not need, in 571, ice-water, stationery, casual messages, calling-cards, or any other form of espionage.” He favored the wilting clerk with a sunny smile and led his companions to the elevator.
Sedgwick put a hand on his arm. “The woman with Blair?” he asked under his breath.
Kent nodded. “I rather hoped that she wouldn’t come,” he said. “Blair might better have told her—so far as he knows.”
“Then he doesn’t know all?”
“No. And perhaps she would be content with nothing else. It is her right. And she is a brave woman, is Marjorie Blair, as Jax here can testify. We have seen her under fire.”
“She is that,” confirmed the man with the twitching chin.
“This, then, is the final clear-up?” asked Sedgwick.
“Final and complete.”
“Thank God! It will be a weight off my shoulders.”
“Off many shoulders,” said Kent. “Here we are.”
Greetings among the little group, so strangely and harshly thrown together by the dice-cast of the hand of Circumstance, were brief and formal. Only Preston Jax was named by Kent, with the comment that his story would be forthcoming. The seven guests seated themselves, the Blairs at one end of the half-circle, Sedgwick and the astrologer at the other. Kent, leaning against the wall, fumbled uncertainly at his ear.
“I hardly know where to begin,” he said, his eyes roving along the intent line. “Not that the case isn’t perfectly clear; but there are certain startling phases which—which—” He glanced toward the Blairs.
Marjorie Blair smiled bravely at him. “Don’t be alarmed for me, Professor Kent,” she said. “What I most want is to have everything cleared up—everything!”
“First, your jewels, then.”
Kent turned to Preston Jax, who handed him a package. Opening it, Kent displayed the wonderful Grosvenor rose-topazes, with a miscellaneous lot of rings sparkling amid their coils. With a cry, Marjorie caught up the necklace.
“Are all the remainder of the lost valuables there, Mrs. Blair?” asked Kent.
She glanced carelessly at the rings. “I think so. Yes. But this is what matters to me.”
“These are all that Preston Jax found on the body.”
Alexander Blair leaned from his seat the better to take Preston Jax, at the other end of the crescent, under consideration.
“It was you who found the body?” he demanded.
“Yes,” said the astrologer uneasily.
“Were you alone when you found it?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. There was a man somewheres near. I heard him, but I never saw him.”
“Was Mr. Francis Sedgwick with you that night?” pursued Mr. Blair in measured tones.
“I never saw Mr. Sedgwick until to-day.”
There was a little soft sigh of relief from where Marjorie Blair sat.
“That may or may not be true,” said Alexander Blair sternly. “It is the word of a man who has robbed a dead body, if, indeed, he did not also kill—”
“Steady, Mr. Blair,” broke in Chester Kent. “Perhaps, considering who is present, we would better approach this in a somewhat calmer spirit.”
“I didn’t kill or rob any one.”
The words seemed to be jerked out from between Preston Jax’s teeth by the spasmodic quiverings of his chin.
“How came you by my daughter’s jewels, then, if you did not take them from the body?”
“Who ever said I didn’t take ’em from the body?” retorted the other. “I did take ’em. But it wasn’t robbery. And what I want to know is, how did they come to be on the body, anyhow? What was that Astræa woman doing with your daughter’s rings and necklace? Tell me that!”
“Wait a moment,” put in Kent. “Explain to Mr. Blair, Jax, what your purpose was in taking the jewels.”
“To hide ’em. I thought the less there was on the body to identify it, the better chance I’d have of getting away. I was so scared that I guess I was half crazy, anyway. And now, I hear, she never has been identified. Is that right?”
Sheriff Schlager half rose from his chair. “Ain’t you told ’em, Professor Kent?”
Kent shook his head.
“Nor you, Mr. Blair?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see why we can’t keep it amongst ourselves,” said the sheriff. “Gansett Jim’s tight as a clam. Nobody’ll ever get anything out of him. And, Lord knows, the less that’s known of it the better I’m suited. I ain’t none too proud of my part in it.”
“There is no reason why it should ever be known outside of this room,” said Kent, and, at the words, Alexander Blair exhaled a pent-up breath of relief. “But it is due to one person here that she should know everything. The question is how to make it clear in the best and—and kindest way.”
“If it will make it easier for any one here to speak,” said Marjorie Blair, “I can say that I understand certain phases of my husband’s past life, thoroughly. There is no need to spare me on that ground.”
“But this pertains to a phase that you do not understand at all.”
“Yes, I think so,” she persisted gently. “This dead woman had some hold over my husband. To maintain it she came to live near Hedgerow House, and while she was blackmailing Wilfrid, she got into communication with Mr. Jax.”
“Perhaps they were in collusion,” suggested Lawyer Bain.
“Oh, no, no!” broke in Alexander Blair impatiently. “You’re wide of the truth.”
“I understand,” persisted the young woman, “that the woman persuaded or compelled Wilfrid to write the letter to Mr. Jax, which she signed Astræa. And that, when she went to keep the rendezvous, she took my jewels, which, I suppose, she forced poor Wilfrid to steal for her. Am I not right, Professor Kent?”
“No. Far from it.”
“Why not?” cried Sedgwick eagerly. “She certainly had the jewels on when she met me. And the handcuffs must have been in the bundle. I heard them clink.”
“Exactly; the handcuffs,” said Kent dryly. “What use, to your mind, would a woman of that sort have for manacles, in those circumstances?”
“Yes,” put in Adam Bain: “they fit in about as nice as a pink silk hat at a funeral.”
“I know what use she had for ’em,” muttered Preston Jax, caressing his wrist. “It’s simply a case of crazy woman; isn’t it, Professor Kent?”
“No. Not if you mean that your assailant was a crazy woman,” said Kent patiently.
“Then who, in heaven’s name, is or was Astræa?” cried Sedgwick.
“Astræa is, I take it, a lady long since dead. A very strange and interesting lady who adopted that name for her own peculiar pursuits along our friend Jax’s lines of interest.”
“They call themselves all sorts of things,” observed the astrologer philosophically. “I had a follower once that used to sign herself Carrie Nation, and she wasn’t the real Carrie at all. No name is sacred to ’em when they go dippy over the stars.”
“Then the woman of Lonesome Cove borrowed that name from some old record?” asked Sedgwick.
“Follow me through a page of unwritten local history,” said Chester Kent, straightening up. “The beginning of this story goes back some seventy-five years, when there lived, not far from Hogg’s Haven, in a house which has since been destroyed, an older sister of Captain Hogg, who married into the Grosvenor family. She was, from the evidence of the Grosvenor family historian, who, by the way, has withheld all this from his pages, a woman of the most extraordinary charm and magnetism. Not beautiful, in the strict sense of the word, she had a gift beyond beauty, and she led men in chains. Her husband appears to have been a weakling who counted for nothing in her life after the birth of her children. Seeking distraction, she flung herself into mysticism and became the priestess of a cult of star-worshipers, which included many of the more cultivated people of this region. Among them was a young German mystic and philosopher, who had fled to this country to escape punishment for political offenses. Hermann von Miltz was his name.”
“That’s why she called me Hermann,” broke in Preston, in an awed half whisper.
“Don’t jump to wild conclusions,” said Kent smilingly. “Some of their correspondence is still extant. She signed herself Astræa, in handwriting similar to the signature of that note of yours, Jax. There seems to have been no guilt between them, as the law judges guilt. The bond was a mystic one. But it was none the less fatal. It culminated in a tragedy of which the details are lost. Perhaps it was an elopement that they planned; perhaps a double suicide, with the idea that their souls would be united in death. There are hints of that in the old letters in the historian’s possession and in the library at Hedgerow House. This much is known: The couple embarked together in a small boat. Von Miltz was never again heard of. Camilla Grosvenor’s body came ashore in Lonesome Cove. She was the Cove’s earliest recorded victim. The sketch which that mischief-monger, Elder Dennett, left at your door, Sedgwick, supposing it to be a likeness of the unfortunate creature he had seen on the road to your house, is a Charles Elliott sketch for the portrait of Camilla Grosvenor.”
“My God!” Jax burst out, “was it a ghost I met up with that night on Hawkill Heights?”
“As near a ghost as you are ever likely to encounter, probably,” answered Kent.
“But, see here,” said Adam Bain, “I’m a lawyer. The law doesn’t deal with ghosts or near-ghosts. Are you trying to tell us, Professor Kent, that the soul of this long-dead Astræa-Camilla Grosvenor, came back to inhabit the body of the Jane Doe of Lonesome Cove?”
“Not precisely that, either. Everything is strictly within the limits of the law’s cognizance, Mr. Bain, as you will see. Now I’m going to make a long jump down to the present. If I fail to keep the trail clear, anywhere, you are any of you at liberty to interrupt me. First, then, I want you to follow with me the course of a figure that leaves Hedgerow House on the late afternoon of July fifth. By chance, the figure is not seen, except at a distance by Gansett Jim, who suspected nothing, then. Otherwise it would have been stopped, as it wears Mrs. Blair’s necklace and rings.”
“Dressing the part of Astræa,” guessed Lawyer Bain.
“Precisely. Our jeweled figure, in a dress that is an old one of Mrs. Blair’s, and with a package in hand, makes its way across country to the coast.”
“To join me,” said Preston Jax.
“To join you. Chance brings the wayfarer face to face with that gentleman of the peekaboo mind, Elder Dennett. They talk. The stranger asks—quite by chance, though the Elder assumed it was otherwise—about the home of Francis Sedgwick. At the entrance to Sedgwick’s place the pair met. There was a curious encounter, ending in Sedgwick’s demanding an explanation of the rose-topazes, which he knew to be Mrs. Blair’s.”
“How did he know that?” demanded Alexander Blair.
“Because I had worn them when I sat to him,” said Marjorie Blair quietly.
“You sat to Sedgwick? For your picture? Why didn’t you tell me of this?”
“No explanation was due you. It was a matter of chance, our acquaintance. Mr. Sedgwick did not even know who I was.”
“Nor who his other visitor was, I suppose!” said Blair with a savage sneer.
“No,” said Sedgwick, “nor do I know to this day.”
“The stranger,” continued Kent, “refused to give Sedgwick any explanation, and when he threatened to follow, stunned him with a rock, and escaped. Some distance down the road the wayfarer encountered Simon P. Groot, the itinerant merchant. Sedgwick afterward met him and made inquiries, but obtained no satisfaction.”
“Why was Mr. Sedgwick so eager to recover the trail, if he had not murder in his mind?” demanded Blair.
“You are proceeding on the theory that Sedgwick, knowing who Mrs. Blair was, and who the strange visitor was, deliberately killed the latter for motives of his own. But Sedgwick can prove that he was back in his house by nine o’clock, and we have a witness here who was talking with the wearer of the necklace at that hour. Jax, let us have your statement.”
Holding the copy of the confession in his hand, in case of confusion of memory, the Star-master told of his rendezvous, of the swift savage attack, of the appalling incident of the manacles, of the wild race across the heights, and of the final tragedy.
“I’ve thought and wondered and figured, day and night,” he said, in conclusion, “and I can’t get at what that rope and the handcuffs meant.”
“The handcuffs must have come from that dreadful collection of Captain Hogg’s things, in the big hallway at Hedgerow House,” said Marjorie Blair.
“Yes,” assented Kent, “and the dim clue to their purpose goes back again, I fancy, to the strange mysticism of the original Astræa. The disordered mind, with which we have to deal, seems to have been guarding against any such separation as divided, in death, Astræa from her Hermann.”
“But, Chester,” objected Sedgwick, “you speak of a disordered mind, and yet you’ve told us that it isn’t a case of insanity.”
“Never,” contradicted Kent. “You’ve misinterpreted what I said. In the early stages of the affair I told you, if you remember, that a very bizarre situation indicated a very bizarre motive. What could be more bizarre than insanity?”
“Was it suicidal insanity, then?” asked Bain.
“Not in the ordinary and intentional sense.”
“Then it was the other man that killed her,” said Preston Jax; “the man I heard yell, when she went over. But what became of him?”
“Simon P. Groot spoke of hearing that man’s scream, too,” confirmed Bain. “Have you got any clue to him, Professor Kent?”
“The other man was Francis Sedgwick,” declared Alexander Blair doggedly.
Chester Kent shook his head.
“I’ve got a witness against that theory, from your own side, Mr. Blair,” said he. “Gansett Jim at first thought as you do. In that belief he tried to kill Mr. Sedgwick. Now he knows his mistake. Isn’t that so, Jim?”
“Yeh,” grunted the half-breed.
“You were out through the countryside that night trying to trace the wanderer.”
“Yeh.”
“And later when I showed you the footprints at the scene of the struggle, you saw that they were not Mr. Sedgwick’s?”
“Yeh.”
“You examined the cliff for footprints. Do you think any one pushed or pursued the victim over the brink?”
“No.”
“Whose were the footprints, that you found, Jim?” demanded Alexander Blair.
The half-breed pointed, in silence, to Preston Jax.
“Of course. His and—and the other’s. But there were the marks of a third person, weren’t there?”
“No.”
“There must have been,” insisted Mr. Blair. “Are you positive?”
“Yeh.”
“Then did the other man, the man whom Jax heard cry out, walk without leaving any trace?”
“There was no other man,” said Chester Kent. “Don’t you understand, Mr. Blair,” he added with significant emphasis, “the source of that cry in the night, heard by Jax and Simon Groot?”
A flash of enlightenment swept Blair’s face. “Ah-h-h!” he said in a long-drawn breath. Then: “I was wrong. I beg Mr. Sedgwick’s pardon.”
Sedgwick bowed. Marjorie Blair’s hand went out, and her fingers closed softly on the tense hand of her father-in-law.
“No third person had any part whatsoever in the drama which Jax has recounted to us,” pursued Kent. “In the morning the body was discovered. Sheriff Schlager was sent for. He found in the pocket something that betrayed the connection of the body with Hedgerow House.”
“A bit of writing-paper, with the heading still legible,” said the sheriff.
“With this he accosted Gansett Jim, who after a night-long search had come out on the cliff. Jim, assuming that the sheriff knew all, told him of the identity of the body. The sheriff saw a chance for money in it—if I do you an injustice, Schlager, you’ll correct me.”
“Go right ahead. Don’t mind me. I’ll take my medicine.”
“Very well. Schlager adopted the ready-made theory which Mr. Jax had prepared for him, so to speak, that the body was washed ashore; and arranged, with the connivance of Doctor Breed, the medical officer, to bury it as an unknown. For this perversion of their duty, Mr. Blair rewarded them handsomely. As I understand it, he dreaded any publicity attaching itself to Hedgerow House and his family.”
“God knows I had suffered enough of that!” murmured Blair.
“Let us hope it is now ended. To avoid this, Mr. Blair was willing even to let the supposed murderer, whom he believed to be Sedgwick, go unscathed of justice. By chance, however, I saw the body on the beach. The most important discovery of all, I missed at that time very stupidly—the more so in that I had a clue, in the character of the assault upon Sedgwick—but I could not overlook the fact that the corpse had not been washed ashore. Moreover, the matter of the manacles stimulated my interest. Not until the inquest, however, did I realize the really startling and unique feature of the case. There is where you and Doctor Breed made your fatal error, Mr. Sheriff.”
“That’s right. You saw the face when we lifted the lid, I s’pose.”
“No. You were too quick in replacing it.”
“Then how did you get on to the thing?”
“From seeing the face after the body was returned to the court room.”
“Hold on a bit,” interrupted Lawyer Bain. “I remember there was a fuss about the corpse not being publicly shown for identification. Some of us insisted. The sheriff gave in. The coffin lid wasn’t quarter off when Breed gave a yell and clapped it on again, and they took the body back to his house and shut themselves in with it for half an hour before they took it to the hall again. Naturally being suspicious, I looked at it pretty close; but I didn’t see anything queer.”
“Possibly you didn’t notice a cut on the cheek?” suggested Kent.
“Yes. Dennett spoke of it and the sheriff shut him up. But what of it? It might have been done in any one of a dozen ways.”
“But it wasn’t there when the body lay on the beach.”
“In the rolling and tossing of the journey there might easily be minor scarifications,” said Sedgwick.
“True. But, Frank, what did you suppose that sudden shift on the part of the officers of the law meant?”
“Perhaps that the body was not in fit condition to be viewed.”
“In that case what could they have done to make it more fit?”
“Nothing, I suppose. I didn’t consider that.”
“I rather opined,” said Lawyer Bain, “that some one had changed bodies on ’em.”
“That’s what made you so cussed curious, was it, Adam?” barked the sheriff.
“There was no exchange of bodies,” said Kent. “But there was a change in the body itself.”
“What kind of a change?” asked Sedgwick.
“Has it ever occurred to you to think that, after death, the hair grows fast?”
“I’ve heard it said,” said Lawyer Bain, “that it grows faster than in life.”
“And that it grows, not only on the head, but on the face as well?”
“The face! A woman’s face?” exclaimed Sedgwick.
“No; a man’s.”
“What man?”
“The man in the coffin.”
“Have you lost your mind, Chet? The body in the coffin was that of the woman who met me at the entrance to the Nook.”
“No. It was the body of the man who, dressed in woman’s clothing, met you at the Nook, and knocked you down with a stone flung overhand as not one woman in a thousand could have thrown it. That, in itself, ought to have suggested the secret to me, long before I discovered it.”
“But how did you discover it?” inquired Sedgwick in bewilderment; “since you didn’t see the growth of beard on the dead face yourself?”
“By the cut on the cheek. You see, the sheriff had failed to foresee that telltale beard. So, when in deference to Mr. Bain’s protest against burial without a formal view of the body, they opened up the casket and saw the obvious change in the face, there was nothing for the officials to do but remedy their carelessness. They had the body taken to the house, and did the best they could. That cut on the cheek was a razor cut. Having realized that much, I had to deal thenceforth with the mystery of a dead man masquerading as a woman, and being abetted in the deception by the officers of the law—”
“Astræa a man!” broke in Preston Jax, his chin in a spasm. “No wonder she—he put up such a fight. Who was he?”
“My son, Wilfrid Blair,” said Alexander Blair.
Sedgwick took a swift involuntary step toward Marjorie, but Kent was before him, setting a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Not now, Frank,” he said. Then, turning to the girl-widow, “You see, Mrs. Blair,” he said very gently, “it isn’t so bad as you feared. There was no other woman in the case, no disgrace, no shame. You need feel nothing but pity for an unhappy wrecked mind, for which death was the happiest refuge.”
Marjorie Blair sat very still and white. “Let me think!” she whispered. “Let me think!”
“But the man’s voice!” exclaimed Jax. “The voice of the man on the cliff!”
“Wilfrid Blair’s,” said Kent. “In the final moment he came to himself. At last he resumed his voice. Up to then he had been, in voice, manner, thought, purpose, unconsciously playing a part.”
“Astræa!” said Sedgwick and Jax in a breath.
“Yes. It was one of those strange and complete assumptions of personality which puzzle the alienists. Wilfrid Blair’s diseased mind had fastened upon the strange history of his ancestress, and brooded on it until he became convinced that her spirit was reincarnated in himself. Undoubtedly his striking likeness to the portrait of Camilla Grosvenor powerfully aided the obsession. There were her letters, in the library, to give color to his unconscious imitation. As is common in this form of dementia, he was secretive. But there can be no doubt that from the time when he recognized in Preston Jax’s advertisement, the call of Astræa’s kindred soul, Hermann von Miltz, his one overwhelming desire was to reenact the drama of the last century, in his own assumed personality. Jax has told us how cleverly and secretly the plan for the double suicide was matured. This obsession must have been of long standing.”
“We thought it melancholia,” said Alexander Blair. “As you say, he had been very secretive. Very silent, too. We kept Gansett Jim with him as a sort of body-guard.”
Marjorie Blair got to her feet. She was ghost-white; but her voice and eyes were steady, as she faced Kent.
“I must understand this all,” she said. “Wilfrid’s body is where?”
“In Annalaka churchyard.”
“Then who—what is buried in his grave at Hedgerow House?”
“Nothing,” said Alexander Blair.
“A mock funeral!”
“My dear,” said the man—he seemed to have grown suddenly old under the unspoken arraignment—“I could not tell you what I thought the truth. I thought then that Wilfrid had encountered Mr. Sedgwick, and that—that there had been a fight in which he was killed. Rather than face the scandal of a murder trial, a scandal in which the family name would have been dragged through the mire of the public prints again, I chose the part of deceit. I’d have bribed a hundred officers of the law rather than have had you dragged to the witness-stand, and have been compelled to give testimony myself. There has been enough of public shame in my life.”
“But you made me believe that Mr. Sedgwick killed Wilfrid!” she accused.
“I believed it myself,” he retorted.
“But what basis had you for suspecting me of the crime?” cried Sedgwick, turning to Marjorie Blair. “You didn’t know of his visit to me in women’s clothes. You knew nothing of the quarrel, it seems, until just now. For what possible reason, in your belief, should I have killed him?”
She flushed to her temples. “I—I—thought,” she murmured, “that he might have known of our acquaintance, and have misconstrued: that he might have gone to find you, and attacked you, and that you killed him. In self-defense, I mean.”
“Thank you for that last, at least,” said Sedgwick rather bitterly. Then, as he saw her wince, “Forgive me!” he added in a low tone. “But, to be suspected by you, even though you were misled—” He stopped, catching Kent’s frowning glance.
“Who discovered that the burial was a false one?” she asked, after a pause.
“Professor Kent,” said Blair. “He and Mr. Sedgwick exhumed the coffin.”
“That was the night—” her eyes questioned Sedgwick.
“That I found you at Hedgerow House. Yes,” he said gently.
“And that my father-in-law charged you with being my husband’s murderer.”
“My dear Mrs. Blair!” said Kent uncomfortably. “Remember what justification he thought he had.”
She considered a moment. “You are right,” she said with an effort. “I don’t mean to be unjust.” Her head dropped in thought. “Whatever Wilfrid may have been,” she continued, after a moment’s silence, “he was my husband. I bear his name. And to leave him in a nameless grave is to dishonor not him alone, but myself.”
“You would claim the body?” cried Alexander Blair.
“What else is there for us to do?” she countered.
“And bring down upon us unavoidably the publicity which we have escaped at so bitter a price?” cried the elder Blair. “Have we not suffered enough from the scandal of his life, that we should be further involved in the scandal of his death?”
“He’s right, miss. It won’t do,” said the sheriff kindly.
“Silence is best,” said Sedgwick.
“What the papers would do with this,” opined Preston Jax, “would be a plenty.”
“My advice is to let be,” proffered Lawyer Bain.
“Yeh,” grunted the half-breed.
“Oh, are you all against me?” she cried. “Mr. Kent, you, too? Do you think me wrong?”
“No,” said Kent.
“Will you drag our name, hers as well as mine, in the mud?” cried the head of the house of Blair.
“No,” said Kent again.
“But how, then—tell me what you intend—”
“No,” said Kent, and with such absolute flat finality that the others looked at him in blank silence.
The silence was broken by a tremendous sigh. All eyes turned to Preston Jax, who had risen and was leaning against the wall, his chin jerking galvanically.
“Well?” said Kent.
“What about me?” asked the Star-master miserably.
Kent’s fingers twitched at his ear lobe. “Well, what about you?” he repeated.
“What are you going to do with me?”
“You? Oh! You go back to Irene,” said Kent, with his half smile. “That’s your sentence, if Mrs. Blair approves.”
The astrologer drew a quick breath. The light of a great relief softened his hard little eyes. A startled look widened them as Marjorie Blair, her own trouble forgotten for the moment, rose and went over to him, the reflection of another’s happiness shining in her face and making it doubly lovely. A ring glinted in her outstretched hand.
“Take this,” she said softly, “for your Irene. May you be very, very happy together!”
For the space of five seconds Preston Jax’s chin was motionless. Then a minor cataclysm convulsed it. Speech emerged from that facial quake, in a half-stutter, half-blubber, wholly absurd and laughter-provoking and heart-moving.
“Wh-wh-whut’ll I say? Whut’ll I do, to thank you, ma’am? I—I—I’ll just tell you this. It’s me for the straight-and-narrow from now on. And if ever you or Professor Kent or any of you want an A-1, special charted, extra-celestial star-reading for self or friends, you—you—you c-c-c-come—” He made a rush for the hallway, and the door banged a period to his emotion.
“I think,” said Chester Kent gravely, “that lesson will last.”
As Marjorie Blair stood smiling, soft-eyed, at the door whence the overcome Star-master had disappeared, Sedgwick started to pass. With quick and unexpected tact, Alexander Blair drew the sheriff and the lawyer aside, giving to the young people their moment. She looked up at Sedgwick with lifted eyebrows.
“Are you not going to speak to me?” she said sorrowfully.
“What is there to say, except one thing—and that I may not say now.”
“No, no!” she whispered, in affright. “But say you forgive me.”
“You! For what?”
“For having believed, even for an instant, what Father Blair said, that you were the murderer.”
Sedgwick smiled bravely. “That is all past.”
“And you’ll think of me at least kindly?”
“I’ll think of you with every beat of my heart,” he said passionately.
Across her face passed the look of fairy wistfulness that was all her own. “No,” she said, “it would be better—for both of us—that you should forget, for the time.”
He leaned over her:
“‘What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
And teach the unforgetful to forget?’”
he quoted very low.
“And yet,” she persisted, “it would be easier, now that I am going away.”
“Going away! For long?”
She nodded with compressed lips. Sedgwick turned very white.
“Oh, don’t look like that!” she faltered. “I can’t bear it! Can’t you see that, after what has happened, I must go? I must have time to forget. There is so much to forget! Surely you can be patient—and trust.”
Again he smiled at her, with a courage shining through his pain that brought the quick tears to her eyes.
“Yes. I can wait and trust—and love.” Again he leaned to her:
“‘And think how she, far from me, with like eyes
Sees, through the untuneful bough the wingless skies.’”
He drew her gaze to his own, held it for the space of a heart-beat, and was gone.