Chapter 5

After a really dreadful interim of silence, the mysterious little visitor rose in a gloomy, discouraged kind of way, and climbing up again on the narrow brass fender, peered once more into the face of the clock.

"It's twenty minutes of eight, now," she announced. Into her voice crept for the first time the faintest perceptible suggestion of a tremor. "It's twenty minutes of eight--now--and I've got to leave here exactly at eight. Twenty minutes is a rather--a rather stingy little bit out of a whole--lifetime," she added falteringly.

Then, and then only did Stanton's nervousness break forth suddenly into one wild, uproarious laugh that seemed to light up the whole dark, ominous room as though the gray, sulky, smoldering hearth-fire itself had exploded into iridescent flame. Chasing close behind the musical contagion of his deep guffaws followed the softer, gentler giggle of the dainty pink-veiled lady.

By the time they had both finished laughing it was fully quarter of eight.

"But you see it was just this way," explained the pleasant little voice--all alto notes again. Cautiously a slim, unringed hand burrowed out from the somber folds of the big cloak, and raised the pink mouth-mumbling veil as much as half an inch above the red-lipped speech line. "You see it was just this way. You paid me a lot of money--all in advance--for a six weeks' special edition de luxe Love-Letter Serial. And I spent your money the day I got it; and worse than that I owed it--long before I even got it! And worst of all, I've got a chance now to go home to-morrow for all the rest of the winter. No, I don't mean that exactly. I mean I've found a chance to go up to Vermont and have all my expenses paid--just for reading aloud every day to a lady who isn't so awfully deaf. But you see I still owe you a week's subscription--and I can't refund you the money because I haven't got it. And it happens that I can't run a fancy love-letter business from the special house that I'm going to. There aren't enough resources there--and all that. So I thought that perhaps--perhaps--considering how much you've been teasing and teasing to know who I was--I thought that perhaps if I came here this evening and let you really see me--that maybe, you know--maybe, not positively, but just _maybe_--you'd be willing to call that equivalent to one week's subscription. _Would you?_"

In the sharp eagerness of her question she turned her shrouded face full-view to Stanton's curious gaze, and he saw the little nervous, mischievous twitch of her lips at the edge of her masking pink veil resolve itself suddenly into a whimper of real pain. Yet so vivid were the lips, so blissfully, youthfully, lusciously carmine, that every single, individual statement she made seemed only like a festive little announcement printed in red ink.

"I guess I'm not a very--good business manager," faltered the red-lipped voice with incongruous pathos. "Indeed I know I'm not because--well because--the Serial-Letter Co. has 'gone broke! Bankrupt', is it, that you really say?"

With a little mockingly playful imitation of a stride she walked the first two fingers of her right hand across the surface of the table to Stanton's discarded supper dishes.

"Oh, please may I have that piece of cold toast?" she asked plaintively. No professional actress on the stage could have spoken the words more deliciously. Even to the actual crunching of the toast in her little shining white teeth, she sought to illustrate as fantastically as possible the ultimate misery of a bankrupt person starving for cold toast.

Stanton's spontaneous laughter attested his full appreciation of her mimicry.

"But I tell you the Serial-Letter Co. _has_ 'gone broke'!" she persisted a trifle wistfully. "I guess--I guess it takes a man to really run a business with any sort of financial success, 'cause you see a man never puts anything except his head into his business. And of course if you only put your head into it, then you go right along giving always just a little wee bit less than 'value received'--and so you can't help, sir, making a profit. Why people would think you were plain, stark crazy if you gave them even one more pair of poor rubber boots than they'd paid for. But a woman! Well, you see my little business was a sort of a scheme to sell sympathy--perfectly good sympathy, you know--but to sell it to people who really needed it, instead of giving it away to people who didn't care anything about it at all. And you have to run that sort of business almost entirely with your heart--and you wouldn't feel decent at all, unless you delivered to everybody just a little tiny bit more sympathy than he paid for. Otherwise, you see you wouldn't be delivering perfectly good sympathy. So that's why--you understand now--that's why I had to send you my very own woolly blanket-wrapper, and my very own silver porringer, and my very own sling-shot that I fight city cats with,--because, you see, I had to use every single cent of your money right away to pay for the things that I'd already bought for other people."

"For other people?" quizzed Stanton a bit resentfully.

"Oh, yes," acknowledged the girl; "for several other people." Then, "Did you like the idea of the 'Rheumatic Nights Entertainment'?" she asked quite abruptly.

"Did I like it?" cried Stanton. "Did I _like_ it?"

With a little shrugging air of apology the girl straightened up very stiffly in her chair.

"Of course it wasn't exactly an original idea," she explained contritely. "That is, I mean not original for you. You see, it's really a little club of mine--a little subscription club of rheumatic people who can't sleep; and I go every night in the week, an hour to each one of them. There are only three, you know. There's a youngish lady in Boston, and a very, very old gentleman out in Brookline, and the tiniest sort of a poor little sick girl in Cambridge. Sometimes I turn up just at supper-time and jolly them along a bit with their gruels. Sometimes I don't get around till ten or eleven o'clock in the great boo-black dark. From two to three in the morning seems to be the cruelest, grayest, coldest time for the little girl in Cambridge.... And I play the banjo decently well, you know, and sing more or less--and tell stories, or read aloud; and I most always go dressed up in some sort of a fancy costume 'cause I can't seem to find any other thing to do that astonishes sick people so much and makes them sit up so bravely and look so shiny. And really, it isn't such dreadfully hard work to do, because everything fits together so well. The short skirts, for instance, that turn me into such a jolly prattling great-grandchild for the poor old gentleman, make me just a perfectly rational, contemporaneous-looking play-mate for the small Cambridge girl. I'm so very, very little!"

"Only, of course," she finished wryly; "only, of course, it costs such a horrid big lot for costumes and carriages and things. That's what's 'busted' me, as the boys say. And then, of course, I'm most dreadfully sleepy all the day times when I ought to be writing nice things for my Serial-Letter Co. business. And then one day last week--" the vivid red lips twisted oddly at one corner. "One night last week they sent me word from Cambridge that the little, little girl was going to die--and was calling and calling for the 'Gray-Plush Squirrel Lady'. So I hired a big gray squirrel coat from a furrier whom I know, and I ripped up my muff and made me the very best sort of a hot, gray, smothery face that I could--and I went out to Cambridge and sat three hours on the footboard of a bed, cracking jokes--and nuts--to beguile a little child's death-pain. And somehow it broke my heart--or my spirit--or something. Somehow I think I could have stood it better with my own skin face! Anyway the little girl doesn't need me any more. Anyway, it doesn't matter if someone did need me!... I tell you I'm 'broke'! I tell you I haven't got one single solitary more thing to give! It isn't just my pocket-book that's empty: it's my head that's spent, too! It's my heart that's altogether stripped! _And I'm going to run away! Yes, I am!_"

Jumping to her feet she stood there for an instant all out of breath, as though just the mere fancy thought of running away had almost exhausted her. Then suddenly she began to laugh.

"I'm so tired of making up things," she confessed; "why, I'm so tired of making up grandfathers, I'm so tired of making up pirates, I'm so tired of making-up lovers--that I actually cherish the bill collector as the only real, genuine acquaintance whom I have in Boston. Certainly there's no slightest trace of pretence about him!... Excuse me for being so flippant," she added soberly, "but you see I haven't got any sympathy left even for myself."

"But for heaven's sake!" cried Stanton, "why don't you let somebody help you? Why don't you let me--"

"Oh, you _can_ help me!" cried the little red-lipped voice excitedly. "Oh, yes, indeed you can help me! That's why I came here this evening. You see I've settled up now with every one of my creditors except you and the youngish Boston lady, and I'm on my way to her house now. We're reading Oriental Fairy stories together. Truly I think she'll be very glad indeed to release me from my contract when I offer her my coral beads instead, because they are dreadfully nice beads, my real, unpretended grandfather carved them for me himself.... But how can I settle with you? I haven't got anything left to settle with, and it might be months and months before I could refund the actual cash money. So wouldn't you--couldn't you please call my coming here this evening an equivalent to one week's subscription?"

Wriggling out of the cloak and veil that wrapped her like a chrysalis she emerged suddenly a glimmering, shimmering little oriental figure of satin and silver and haunting sandalwood--a veritable little incandescent rainbow of spangled moonlight and flaming scarlet and dark purple shadows. Great, heavy, jet-black curls caught back from her small piquant face by a blazing rhinestone fillet,--cheeks just a tiny bit over-tinted with rouge and excitement,--big, red-brown eyes packed full of high lights like a startled fawn's,--bold in the utter security of her masquerade, yet scared almost to death by the persistent underlying heart-thump of her unescapable self-consciousness,--altogether as tantalizing, altogether as unreal, as a vision out of the Arabian Nights, she stood there staring quizzically at Stanton.

"_Would_ you call it--an--equivalent? _Would_ you?" she asked nervously.

Then pirouetting over to the largest mirror in sight she began to smooth and twist her silken sash into place. Somewhere at wrist or ankle twittered the jingle of innumerable bangles.

"Oh! Don't I look--gorgeous!" she stammered. "O--h--h!"

VIII

Everything that was discreet and engaged-to-be-married in Stanton's conservative make-up exploded suddenly into one utterly irresponsible speech.

"You little witch!" he cried out. "You little beauty! For heaven's sake come over here and sit down in this chair where I can look at you! I want to talk to you! I--"

Pirouetting once more before the mirror, she divided one fleet glance between admiration for herself and scorn for Stanton.

"Oh, yes, I felt perfectly sure that you'd insist upon having me 'pretty'!" she announced sternly. Then courtesying low to the ground in mock humility, she began to sing-song mischievously:

"So Molly, Molly made-her-a-face, Made it of rouge and made it of lace. Long as the rouge and the lace are fair, Oh, Mr. Man, what do you care?"

"You don't need any rouge or lace to make _you_ pretty!" Stanton fairly shouted in his vehemence. "Anybody might have known that that lovely, little mind of yours could only live in a--"

"Nonsense!" the girl interrupted, almost temperishly. Then with a quick, impatient sort of gesture she turned to the table, and picking up book after book, opened it and stared in it as though it had been a mirror. "Oh, maybe my mind is pretty enough," she acknowledged reluctantly. "But likelier than not, my face is not becoming--to me."

Crossing slowly over to Stanton's side she seated herself, with much jingling, rainbow-colored, sandalwood-scented dignity, in the chair that the Doctor had just vacated.

"Poor dear, you've been pretty sick, haven't you?" she mused gently. Cautiously then she reached out and touched the soft, woolly cuff of his blanket-wrapper. "Did you really like it?" she asked.

Stanton began to smile again. "Did I really like it?" he repeated joyously. "Why, don't you know that if it hadn't been for you I should have gone utterly mad these past few weeks? Don't you know that if it hadn't been for you--don't you know that if--" A little over-zealously he clutched at the tinsel fringe on the oriental lady's fan. "Don't you know--don't you know that I'm--engaged to be married?" he finished weakly.

The oriental lady shivered suddenly, as any lady might shiver on a November night in thin silken clothes. "Engaged to be married?" she stammered. "Oh, yes! Why--of course! Most men are! Really unless you catch a man very young and keep him absolutely constantly by your side you cannot hope to walk even into his friendship--except across the heart of some other woman." Again she shivered and jingled a hundred merry little bangles. "But why?" she asked abruptly, "why, if you're engaged to be married, did you come and--buy love-letters of me? My love-letters are distinctly for lonely people," she added severely.

"How dared you--How dared you go into the love-letter business in the first place?" quizzed Stanton dryly. "And when it comes to asking personal questions, how dared you send me printed slips in answer to my letters to you? Printed slips, mind you!... How many men are you writing love-letters to, anyway?"

The oriental lady threw out her small hands deprecatingly. "How many men? Only two besides yourself. There's such a fad for nature study these days that almost everybody this year has ordered the 'Gray-Plush Squirrel' series. But I'm doing one or two 'Japanese Fairies' for sick children, and a high school history class out in Omaha has ordered a weekly epistle from William of Orange."

"Hang the High School class out in Omaha!" said Stanton. "It was the love-letters that I was asking about."

"Oh, yes, I forgot," murmured the oriental lady. "Just two men besides yourself, I said, didn't I? Well one of them is a life convict out in an Illinois prison. He's subscribed for a whole year--for a fortnightly letter from a girl in Killarney who has got to be named 'Katie'. He's a very, very old man, I think, but I don't even know his name 'cause he's only a number now--'4632'--or something like that. And I have to send all my letters over to Killarney to be mailed--Oh, he's awfully particular about that. And it was pretty hard at first working up all the geography that he knew and I didn't. But--pshaw! You're not interested in Killarney. Then there's a New York boy down in Ceylon on a smelly old tea plantation. His people have dropped him, I guess, for some reason or other; so I'm just 'the girl from home' to him, and I prattle to him every month or so about the things he used to care about. It's easy enough to work that up from the social columns in the New York papers--and twice I've been over to New York to get special details for him; once to find out if his mother was really as sick as the Sunday paper said, and once--yes, really, once I butted in to a tea his sister was giving, and wrote him, yes, wrote him all about how the moths were eating up the big moose-head in his own front hall. And he sent an awfully funny, nice letter of thanks to the Serial-Letter Co.--yes, he did! And then there's a crippled French girl out in the Berkshires who is utterly crazy, it seems, about the 'Three Musketeers', so I'm d'Artagnan to her, and it's dreadfully hard work--in French--but I'm learning a lot out of that, and--"

"There. Don't tell me any more!" cried Stanton.

Then suddenly the pulses in his temples began to pound so hard and so loud that he could not seem to estimate at all just how loud he was speaking.

"Who are you?" he insisted. "Who are you? Tell me instantly, I say! _Who are you anyway?_"

The oriental lady jumped up in alarm. "I'm no one at all--to you," she said coolly, "except just--Molly Make-Believe."

Something in her tone seemed to fairly madden Stanton.

"You shall tell me who you are!" he cried. "You shall! I say you shall!"

Plunging forward he grabbed at her little bangled wrists and held them in a vise that sent the rheumatic pains shooting up his arms to add even further frenzy to his brain.

"Tell me who you are!" he grinned. "You shan't go out of here in ten thousand years till you've told me who you are!"

Frightened, infuriated, quivering with astonishment, the girl stood trying to wrench her little wrists out of his mighty grasp, stamping in perfectly impotent rage all the while with her soft-sandalled, jingling feet.

"I won't tell you who I am! I won't! I won't!" she swore and reswore in a dozen different staccato accents. The whole daring passion of the Orient that costumed her seemed to have permeated every fiber of her small being.

Then suddenly she drew in her breath in a long quivering sigh. Staring up into her face, Stanton gave a little groan of dismay, and released her hands.

"Why, Molly! Molly! You're--crying," he whispered. "Why, little girl! Why--"

Backing slowly away from him, she made a desperate effort to smile through her tears.

"Now you've spoiled everything," she said.

"Oh no, not--everything," argued Stanton helplessly from his chair, afraid to rise to his feet, afraid even to shuffle his slippers on the floor lest the slightest suspicion of vehemence on his part should hasten that steady, backward retreat of hers towards the door.

Already she had re-acquired her cloak and overshoes and was groping out somewhat blindly for her veil in a frantic effort to avoid any possible chance of turning her back even for a second on so dangerous a person as himself.

"Yes, everything," nodded the small grieved face. Yet the tragic, snuffling little sob that accompanied the words only served to add a most entrancing, tip-nosed vivacity to the statement.

"Oh, of course I know," she added hastily. "Oh, of course I know perfectly well that I oughtn't to have come alone to your rooms like this!" Madly she began to wind the pink veil round and round and round her cheeks like a bandage. "Oh, of course I know perfectly well that it wasn't even remotely proper! But don't you think--don't you think that if you've always been awfully, awfully strict and particular with yourself about things all your life, that you might have risked--safely--just one little innocent, mischievous sort of a half hour? Especially if it was the only possible way you could think of to square up everything and add just a little wee present besides? 'Cause nothing, you know, that you can _afford_ to give ever seems exactly like giving a really, truly present. It's got to hurt you somewhere to be a 'present'. So my coming here this evening--this way--was altogether the bravest, scariest, unwisest, most-like-a-present-feeling-thing that I could possibly think of to do--for you. And even if you hadn't spoiled everything, I was going away to-morrow just the same forever and ever and ever!"

Cautiously she perched herself on the edge of a chair, and thrust her narrow, gold-embroidered toes into the wide, blunt depths of her overshoes. "Forever and ever!" she insisted almost gloatingly.

"Not forever and _ever_!" protested Stanton vigorously. "You don't think for a moment, do you, that after all this wonderful, jolly friendship of ours, you're going to drop right out of sight as though the earth had opened?"

Even the little quick, forward lurch of his shoulders in the chair sent the girl scuttling to her feet again, one overshoe still in her hand.

Just at the edge of the door-mat she turned and smiled at him mockingly. Really it had been a long time since she had smiled.

"Surely you don't think that you'd be able to recognize me in my street clothes, do you?" she asked bluntly.

Stanton's answering smile was quite as mocking as hers.

"Why not?" he queried. "Didn't I have the pleasure of choosing your winter hat for you? Let me see,--it was brown, with a pink rose--wasn't it? I should know it among a million."

With a little shrug of her shoulders she leaned back against the door and stared at him suddenly out of her big red-brown eyes with singular intentness.

"Well, _will_ you call it an equivalent to one week's subscription?" she asked very gravely.

Some long-sleeping devil of mischief awoke in Stanton's senses.

"Equivalent to one whole week's subscription?" he repeated with mock incredulity. "A whole week--seven days and nights? Oh, no! No! No! I don't think you've given me, yet, more than about--four days' worth to think about. Just about four days' worth, I should think."

Pushing the pink veil further and further back from her features, with plainly quivering hands, the girl's whole soul seemed to blaze out at him suddenly, and then wince back again. Then just as quickly a droll little gleam of malice glinted in her eyes.

"Oh, all right then," she smiled. "If you really think I've given you only four days' and nights' worth of thoughts--here's something for the fifth day and night."

Very casually, yet still very accurately, her right hand reached out to the knob of the door.

"To cancel my debt for the fifth day," she said, "do you really 'honest-injun' want to know who I am? I'll tell you! First, you've seen me before."

"What?" cried Stanton, plunging forward in his chair.

Something in the girl's quick clutch of the door-knob warned him quite distinctly to relax again into his cushions.

"Yes," she repeated triumphantly. "And you've talked with me too, as often as twice! And moreover you've danced with me!"

Tossing her head with sudden-born daring she reached up and snatched off her curly black wig, and shook down all around her such a great, shining, utterly glorious mass of mahogany colored hair that Stanton's astonishment turned almost into faintness.

"What?" he cried out. "What? You say I've seen you before? Talked with you? Waltzed with you, perhaps? Never! I haven't! I tell you I haven't! I never saw that hair before! If I had, I shouldn't have forgotten it to my dying day. Why--"

With a little wail of despair she leaned back against the door. "You don't even remember me _now_?" she mourned. "Oh dear, dear, dear! And I thought _you_ were so beautiful!" Then, woman-like, her whole sympathy rushed to defend him from her own accusations. "Oh, well, it was at a masquerade party," she acknowledged generously, "and I suppose you go to a great many masquerades."

Heaping up her hair like so much molten copper into the hood of her cloak, and trying desperately to snare all the wild, escaping tendrils with the softer mesh of her veil, she reached out a free hand at last and opened the door just a crack.

"And to give you something to think about for the sixth day and night," she resumed suddenly, with the same strange little glint in her eyes, "to give you something to think about the sixth day, I'll tell you that I really was hungry--when I asked you for your toast. I haven't had anything to eat to-day; and--"

Before she could finish the sentence Stanton had sprung from his chair, and stood trying to reason out madly whether one single more stride would catch her, or lose her.