The Letter of the Contract | Page 7

stroll in the Park?"
"What? We three?"
"Oh, she's gone--if that's the only reason."
Turning, Edith saw the woman with the rose-colored parasol rapidly
descending the path by which she had come.
[Illustration: He turned from the girl to his wife. "I'm willing to explain
anything you like--as far as I can."]
"I'd still rather stay out here," she said. "If I were to go in, I think it
would--"
"Yes? What?"
"I think it would kill me."
"Oh, come, Edith. Let's face the thing calmly. Don't let us become
hysterical."
"Am I hysterical, Chip?"
"In your own way, yes. Where another woman would make a fuss,
you're unnaturally frozen; but it comes to the same thing. I know that
your heart--"
"Is breaking. Oh, I don't deny that. But I'd rather it broke here than
indoors. I don't know why, but I can stand it here, with people going by;
whereas in there--"
"Oh, cut it, Edith, for God's sake! Can't you see that my heart's
breaking, too?"

She looked him in the face, shaking her head sadly. "No, Chip, I can't
see that. If there had been any danger of it you wouldn't have--"
"But I couldn't help it. That's what you don't seem to understand."
"No; I'm afraid I don't."
"Would you try to understand--if I were to tell you?"
"I think I know already most of what you'd have to say. She's a woman
whom you knew long before you knew me--and from whom you've
never been able--"
"She was the daughter of a Swedish Lutheran pastor--dead
now--established in New Jersey. In some way she drifted to the stage.
Her name was Margarethe Kastenskjold. When she went on the stage
she made it Maggie Clare. She had about as much talent for the theater
as a paper doll. When I first knew her she was still getting odd jobs in
third and fourth rate companies. Since then she hasn't played at all."
"I understand. There's been no need of it. She's quite well dressed."
"Let me go on, will you, Edith? I was about two or three and twenty
then. She may have been a year or two older. She was living at that
time with Billy Cummings. And somehow it happened--after Billy
died--and she was stranded--"
She made an appealing gesture. "Please! I know how those things come
about--or I can easily imagine. In your case--I'd--I'd rather not try." She
got the words out somehow without breaking down.
"All the same, Edith," he went on, "you'll have to try--if you're going to
do me anything like justice. If she hadn't been a refined, educated sort
of girl, entirely at sea in her surroundings, and stranded--stranded for
money, mind you, next door to going to starve--and no chance of
getting a job, because she couldn't act a little bit--if it hadn't been for all
that--"

"Oh, I know how you'd be generous!"
"Yes; but you don't know how I came to be a fool."
"Is there any reason why I should know--now that the fact is there?"
He looked at her steadily. "Edith! What are you made of?"
She returned his look. "I think--of stone. Up till to-day I've been a
woman of flesh and blood; but I'm not sure that I am any longer. You
can't kill the heart in a woman's body--and still expect her to feel."
"But, Edith--Edith darling--there's no reason why I should have killed
the heart in your body when I never dreamed of doing you a
wrong--that is, an intentional wrong," he corrected.
"You knew you were doing some woman a wrong--some future woman,
the woman you'd marry--as far back as when you took up what Billy
Cummings dropped from his dead hands--"
"Oh, that! That, dear, is nothing but the talk of feminist meetings. Men
are men, and women are women. You can't make one law for them
both. Besides, it's too big a subject to go into now."
"I'm not trying to. I wasn't thinking of men in general; I was thinking
only of you."
"But, good Lord, Edith, you don't think I've been better than any one
else, do you?"
Her forlorn smile made his heart ache. "I did think so. I dare say it was
a mistake."
"It was a mistake. If you hadn't made it--"
"But it was at least a mistake one can understand. I could hardly be
expected to take it for granted--whatever men may be, or may have the
right to be--that the man who asked me to marry him--and who made
me love him as I think few men have been loved by women--I could

hardly take it for granted that he was already keeping--and had been
keeping for years--and would keep for years to come--another--"
He moved impatiently. "But, I tell you, I