She smiled again, more pleasantly, and I came nearer to liking her that morning than I ever did, before or after. She looked younger and simpler, and not too sure of herself.

“I’m perfectly willing,” I told her. “Of course, I’ll help you. Do you want to pay the bills?”

“Good heavens, no,” she said, looking startled. “I want to know how much they amount to. I can’t add to save my life.”

It took some time. She owed money everywhere, especially in New York, and the total was over twenty thousand dollars. There were millinery and clothes bills, and one or two from jewelers. So far as I could see she had paid nothing for the last two years except for her bare living. Even the car was not paid for, and—she had gone to her dressing table and was making up her face—she threw in the fact that they were threatening to take it away from her.

She talked as she worked over her face. She usually traveled with a maid, but she had had to let her go. It was hell to be poor, wasn’t it? But her spirits had risen, as though by merely handing me the bills she had gotten rid of them.

As she had, for a few days later Maud paid them.

“I suppose I’m an idiot, Pat,” she said as she gave them to me. “It’s the price I pay for peace. But what on earth has she done with the money I gave her? Or Tony’s allowance? It’s a big one.” She sighed.

“I wonder how long she means to stay?” she said fretfully. “Hilda says her trunks have come. I don’t think I can bear much more, Pat. I’ve paid her bills. Why doesn’t she go?”

I told her Bessie had said she didn’t intend to stay, but it failed to comfort her.

“She’s up to something,” she said drearily. “She is different this time, Pat. She has some mischief in her mind. She almost frightens me.”

I do not believe that in those first four days Bessie and Tony had any private conversation whatever. She had begun to go about, looking up old friends and acquaintances, and one afternoon she asked me about Audrey Morgan.

“What’s she like?” she asked. “I hear Tony’s been playing around with her.”

“She’s very young and very lovely.”

“Does he want to marry her?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

She laughed. “He’s not going to,” she said coolly. “He’s not going to marry anybody. I’ll see to that.”

We managed somehow, although the conservative part of the Hill rather pointedly avoided us. Even Margery Stoddard only came when she knew Bessie was out, and then usually to let the children bathe in our pool, the repairs on their own being still unfinished. Once or twice Julian came with her, a handsome, stockily built man who had married late in life and adored his little girls. Dwight Elliott came, of course. I overheard him one evening urging Tony to get a divorce or force Bessie to get one.