Babe and Bearcat Delaney are now free to enjoy another honeymoon. The youngsters were too happy to discuss their future plans, but it was not denied that the Bearcat will make another attempt to win the middleweight crown. Charlie Yates, the Bearcat’s former manager, says Delaney is class again, and he intends grooming him for the championship. Mrs. Bearcat says she’ll see that her husband trains harder for this fight than ever before. She wants him to stage a sensational comeback in the squared circle.

XXVII LIFE MOVES ON

BABE and the Bearcat had faced the greatest crisis in their lives. Sitting together in the Bearcat’s hotel room, Babe smiled peacefully up at him. He felt his old ring invincibility, the confident power that surges up to meet and batter down all opposition, no matter how fierce.

They were united, welded together again, Babe and himself. Perseverance had triumphed. He had won her back. The bitter heart hunger, the morbid despair he had suffered owing to her indifference, was only a memory now. He felt as he had the day he took Babe to Jersey and married her.

They were back at the Hotel Europe now. Congratulations by letter and telegram continued to arrive from everybody they had ever known. The newspapers were featuring the story of the romantic couple that had faced death’s door together.

News syndicates and motion picture companies made them offers for a true confession story of their love life.

But what heaped the measure of the Bearcat’s happiness was Charlie’s coming to the hotel to offer congratulations and a match with Doc Sherman as preparation for another crack at the championship.

Babe was with him continually and watched him train. The sports writers got word that the Bearcat was class again and gave him feature space, making prophecies that filled the Bearcat to the brim with confidence.

When the Bearcat stepped into the ring against Doc Sherman, he had the body of a Greek runner. Under his well tanned skin, muscles and cords rippled in undulating grace. There was power a-plenty in bone and sinew.

Babe sat near his corner at the ringside where he could talk to her between rounds. The Bearcat knocked out Doc Sherman in the fourth round. He would fight the champion again. . . .

Three days after his victory the Bearcat was alone. A week later a cablegram sent from Paris, and signed by Wayne Baldwin, notified him that Babe was arranging a divorce while she was in Europe.

Charlie was sitting beside the Bearcat, on the bed in his room at the Nelson when a bell hop handed the cable to him. They read it together.