Part 2

This woman framed in the doorway was Madeline--_her_ Madeline? This woman whose dumpy figure was swathed in a bedraggled negligee that had once been clean! This woman whose scalp was haloed by a crescent of kid-curlers that held in hard lumps her brass-hued front hair! This woman with the hard, light eyes and sagging mouth-lines and beaklike nose--this woman whose face was sallow and coarse, because it had not yet received its daily dress of make-up! This--_this_ was Madeline!

“What can I do for you?” the woman was saying for the second time, her early air of curiosity merging into one of dawning hostility.

“I am the switchboard operator downstairs,” said Daisy faintly.

A look of terror that had all along lurked in the hard eyes now sprang to new light.

“What do you want of me?”

“I want to tell you your husband heard the last part of your phone-talk just now,” returned Daisy conscientiously, though her heart was no longer in her mission of rescue. “He called me up about it. I--”

“You told him?” blithered the woman in panic.

“I told him your apartment hadn’t had a call all morning.”

“You _did_?” cried the woman, her sweet voice sharpening to a peacock screech of relief. “Good for you! Good for _you_! And you were perfectly right to come directly up here for your pay. What do you think would be fair reward? Don’t be afraid to say. You’ve done me a great service, and--”

“I don’t understand you,” stammered Daisy. “I don’t understand you at all. If you think I did this for money--”

“My dear,” laughed the woman nervously, “we do everything for money. So you needn’t be ashamed. We don’t always _say_ it’s for money. But it is. That’s why I got into this scrape. My husband is the stingiest man in New York. He pretends his business is on such a ragged edge that he can’t give me any extra cash. But I know better. That’s why I let myself get interested in Mr. Schreiner. He is a widower, and he has more money than he can--”

“Oh!” cried Daisy in sick horror.

“So he’ll make it good to you for all that you’ve done for us,” prattled on the woman, without noticing. “He’ll--”

“That isn’t why I came up here!” broke in Daisy angrily. “And I don’t want your filthy money, either. I wont touch it. I came up here to warn you that your husband is going to--”

The buzz of the flat’s front-door bell interrupted her. The woman, too, turned nervously to look. They heard the maid fumble with the knob. Then some one brushed past the servant and into the living-room.

The intruder was a chunky and yellowish man, of late middle years--incredibly bald of head and suspiciously black of eyebrows. He caught sight of Mrs. Vanbrugh, who chanced to be standing between him and Daisy. And he exclaimed:

“I jumped into a taxi and hustled here, as soon as I left the phone. I didn’t dare call up again. Do you suppose he recognized me?”

Yes, the voice was indubitably the voice of Karl. But the fat and elderly swain was in anything but a loverly mood. He was a-quake with terror. Beads of sweat trickled down on his brows and mustache. His yellowish complexion was blotchy from fear. He was not a pretty sight.

Daisy by this time should have been past surprise. Yet her preconceived vision of Karl--of young, athletic, hero-featured Karl--died hard and in much and sudden pain. Poor Daisy! Until he spoke, she had mistaken him for the husband.

“If he knew my voice,” babbled the man, “we’re up against it. I’d better get out of town for a while, I suppose. Maybe he--”

“Don’t worry!” interposed Madeline acidly. “You wont have to run away from town and leave me to face it all. This girl has gotten us out of it. She is the operator downstairs. Phil called up and asked her all sorts of questions. And she told him the apartment hadn’t had a call all morning. Isn’t she a brick?”

A sound like the exhaust of an empty soda-siphon broke from between Karl’s puffy lips--a sound of pure if porcine reaction from dread.

“Good girl!” he croaked, still hoarse with recent fright. “_Dandy_ girl!”

He sought to pat Daisy approvingly on the shoulder with one pudgy hand. She recoiled.

“How much?” he asked jovially, not observing the stark repulsion in her face and gesture as she shrank away. “How much, little girl? You’ve done a mighty big stroke of business this day. What do you say I owe you? Or will you leave it to me to do the right thing by you?”

He juggled a bloated wad of bills from his trousers pocket as he spoke. And at his motion something in Daisy’s taut brain seemed to snap.

The girl did not “see red.” She saw only two fat and greasy creatures who thought she was as vile as they--who took it for granted that she had done this thing to extort a rich tip from them, for covering up their sin. And wrath gave her back her momentarily lost power of speech.

“_Oh!_” she cried in utter loathing, “you’d dare _pay_ me for trying to help you? If I’d known what you both are, all the money in New York wouldn’t have gotten me to lift a finger for you. You horrible--”

“There, there, my dear!” oilily soothed Karl. “You’re a little bit excited. Calm down and tell us how much--”

“If you don’t want pay,” shrilled Madeline, “what did you come here for?”

“What did I come here for?” echoed Daisy, white with rage. “To make a fool of myself, of course. To warn you that your husband is going to get the call-lists for the past month from the super, and find out from them what numbers you’ve been calling up. That’s--”

“Good Lord!” gabbled the woman in crass horror.

Karl’s fat jaw dropped upon his fatter throat. He tried to speak. He could only gargle.

“That’s why I came here!” finished Daisy, striding past them toward the door. “To warn you. And now I’ve done it. Your husband’s liable to be streaking back home any minute now. And I’m going. And if either of you says any more about money, I’ll--”

She was making for the outer door. But for all her start, Karl reached it three lengths ahead of her. He banged it shut after him as he darted out. Through the panel Daisy could hear him ringing frantically for the elevator.

Daisy was following, when a choking sound made her turn back. The woman still stood in the middle of the living-room. Her hard, light eyes were dark and dilated. Her sallow face was haggard and ghastly. Yet her features were unmoved. There was about her bearing and expression a certain hopeless courage that lent dignity to the squat figure.

Daisy hesitated--then turned back into the room. The woman stared dully past her toward the doorway through which Karl had vanished. She acknowledged the girl’s presence by muttering, in a curiously dead voice, more to herself than to Daisy:

“Men are queer animals, aren’t they? He has sworn to me, time and again, that he’d stand by me to the end.”

“Yes,” assented Daisy in perfect simplicity, “I’ve heard him say it to you myself--twice.”

“He’s gone,” went on the woman in that same dead voice so unlike her own. “He’s gone. And I’m left to hold the bag. I--I think I’m cured. There are worse things than a husband who loves you--even if he can’t give you all the money you want to spend. Phil would never have run away like that, from _anything_--not that the lesson is likely to do me any good, now.”

“Here!” exclaimed the girl, shaking the dazed Madeline roughly by the shoulder. “I’m going to get you out of this. I don’t know why, but I am. Maybe I’ve a bill of my own to pay, as well as you have. We’ve all done some learning to-day, I guess. And learning isn’t on the free-list.”

“But--”

“Go to the phone right away,” commanded Daisy, “and call up the super. Tell him you’ve got to see him, up here, in a hurry. Act scared. Tell him it can’t wait a single minute. Get him up here. That’s the main thing. Then--then tell him you want new faucets in the bathroom. Or tell him anything at all. Do as I say. Jump! There isn’t much time to waste. Hubby’s sure to be hotfooting it home. And when hubby comes, deny everything. _Deny!_ And keep on denying. He wont have any proof, remember that. _He’ll have no proof._ Pay for the lie by being a whole lot decenter to him, forever-after-amen.”

Moving away from the dumfounded woman, Daisy bolted out of the flat and was lucky enough to catch a down-going elevator. She reached the ground floor just as the building’s perplexed superintendent came to the shaft on his way to answer Madeline’s urgent summons.

Into the superintendent’s deserted office sped Daisy. Going directly to his unlocked desk, she rummaged feverishly amid its drawers until she found what she wanted.

Crumpling and pocketing the telephone-sheets for the past two months, she crossed to the file cabinet, hunted through a stack of dusty papers and drew forth the sheaf of penciled telephone-slips for the preceding year.

Selecting from these the slips for the two corresponding months, she put back the rest of the Sheaf. Then, changing with eraser and pencil the date of the year on the two slips she had abstracted from the cabinet, she put them in the drawer. After which, feeling oddly weak about the knees, she started out of the office.

At the door she almost collided with the returning superintendent. Vexed at having been called upstairs in such haste on an utterly trivial errand, he very naturally wreaked his ill-temper on the first subordinate he chanced to meet--which was Daisy.

“What are you doing away from your switchboard?” he snarled. “I won’t stand for any loafing. Get that into your mind, once and for all. What did you want in here, anyhow?”

“I came in to see you, sir,” was the girl’s demure reply.

“What do you want of me?” he rasped.

“I wanted to tell you I’m leaving here to-morrow,” said Daisy. “I’m going back to work at the Exchange. I’m lonesome on this job. There aren’t enough things happening at the Clavichord Arms. It’s too slow--not enough excitement for a live wire like me. That’s all, sir.”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the October 1917 issue of Blue Book magazine.]