"I"ve a sort of favor to ask of you," he said. "I"ve some friends who"re motoring over to-day from Philadelphia. I had to run on down ahead of them to see a man on business. They"re to join me in about an hour from now"--he consulted his watch--"and we"re all driving back together to-night. General Dunlap and Mrs. Claire Denton, his daughter--she"s the amateur tennis champion, you know--and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, of Newport, and Freddy Urb, the writer--they"re all in the party. And the favor I"m asking is that I may have the pleasure of presenting them to you--that is, of course, unless you already know them--so that I may enjoy the looks on their faces when they find out that you are not Mrs. Beeman Watrous. I know they"ll behave as I did. They won"t believe it at first.
May I?"
What could Mrs. Propbridge do except consent? Indeed, inwardly she rejoiced at the prospect. She did not know personally the four named by this Mr. Murrill, but she knew mighty well who they were. What person familiar with the Social Register could fail to know who they were?
Another thing had impressed her: The stranger had mentioned these notables with no especial emphasis on the names; but instead, quite casually and in a manner which carried with it the impression that such noted folk as Mrs. Denton and her distinguished father, and Freddy Urb the court jester of the innermost holies of holies of Newport and Bar Harbor and Palm Beach, and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, the famous beauty, were of the sort with whom customarily he a.s.sociated. Plainly here was a gentleman who not only belonged to the who"s-who but had a very clear perception of the what-was-what. So fluttered little Mrs. Propbridge promptly said yes--said it with a gratified sensation in her heart.
"That"s fine of you!" said Murrill, visibly elated. It would appear that small favors were to him great pleasures. "That"s splendid!
Up until now the joke of this thing has been on me. I want to transfer it to them. I"m to meet them up here in the lounge of the Churchill-Fontenay."
"That"s where I am stopping," said Mrs. Propbridge.
"Is it? Better and better! We might stroll along that way if you don"t mind. By Jove, I"ve an idea! Suppose when they arrive they found us chatting together like old friends--suppose as they came up they were to overhear me calling you Mrs. Beeman Watrous. That would make the shock all the greater for them when they found out you really weren"t Mrs.
Watrous at all, but somebody they"d never seen before! Are you game for it?... Capital! Only, if we mean to do that we"ll have to kill the time, some way, for forty or fifty minutes or so. Do you mind letting me bore you for a little while? I know it"s unconventional--but I like to do the unconventional things when they don"t make one conspicuous."
Mrs. Propbridge did not in the least mind. So they killed the time and it died a very agreeable death, barring one small incident. On Mr.
Murrill"s invitation they took a short turn in a double-seated roller chair, Mr. Murrill chatting briskly all the while and savoring his conversation with offhand reference to this well-known personage and that. At his suggestion they quit the wheel chair at a point well down the boardwalk to drink orangeades in a small gla.s.s-fronted cafe which faced the sea. He had heard somewhere, he said, that they made famous orangeades in this shop. They might try for themselves and find out.
The experiment was not entirely a success. To begin with, a waiter person--Mr. Murrill referred to him as a waiter person--sat them down near the front at a small, round table whose enamel top was decorated with two slopped gla.s.ses and a bottle one-third filled with wine gone stale. At least the stuff looked and smelled like wine--like a poor quality of champagne.
"Ugh!" said Mr. Murrill, tasting the air. "Somebody evidently couldn"t wait until lunch time before he started his tippling. And I didn"t suspect either that this place might be a bootlegging place in disguise.
Well, since prohibition came in it"s hard to find a resort shop anywhere where you can"t buy bad liquor--if only you go about it the right way."
When the waiter person brought their order he bade him remove the bottle and the slopped gla.s.ses, and the waiter person obliged, but so sulkily and with such slowness of movement that Mr. Murrill was moved to speak to him rather sharply. Even so, the sullen functionary took his time about the thing. Nor did the orangeade prove particularly appetizing.
Mr. Murrill barely tasted his.
"Shall we clear out?" he asked, making a fastidious little grimace.
At the door, on the way out, he made excuses.
"Sorry I suggested coming into this place," he said, sinking his voice.
"Either it is a shop which has gone off badly or its merits have been overadvertised by its loving friends. To me the whole atmosphere of the establishment seemed rather dubious, eh, what? Well, what shall we do next? I see a few bathers down below. Shall we go down on the beach and find a place to sit and watch them for a bit?"
They went; and he found a bench in a quiet place under the shorings of the boardwalk close up alongside one of the lesser bathing pavilions, and they sat there, and he talked and she listened. The man had an endless fund of gossip about amusing and noted people; most of them, it would seem, were his intimates. Telling one or two incidents in which these distinguished friends had figured, he felt it expedient to sink his voice to a discreet undertone. There was plainly apparent a delicacy of feeling in this; one did not shout out the names of such persons for any curious pa.s.ser-by to hear. It developed that there was one specially close bond between him and the members of General Dunlap"s family, an attachment partly based upon old acquaintance and partly upon the fact that the Dunlaps thought he once upon a time had saved the life of the general"s youngest daughter, Millicent.
"Really, though, it was nothing," he said deprecatingly, as befitted a modest and a mannerly man. "The thing came about like this: It was once when we were all out West together. We were spending a week at the Grand Canon. One morning we took the Rim Drive over to Mohave Point. No doubt you know the spot? I was standing with Millicent on the outer edge of the cliff and we were looking down together into that tremendous void when all of a sudden she fainted dead away. Her heart isn"t very strong--she isn"t athletic as Claire, her older sister, and the other Dunlap girls are--and I suppose the alt.i.tude got her. Luckily I was as close to her as I am to you now, and I saw her totter and I threw out my arms--pardon me--like this." He ill.u.s.trated with movements of his arms.
"And luckily I managed to catch her about the waist as she fell forward.
I held on and dragged her back out of danger. Otherwise she would have dropped for no telling how many hundreds of feet. Of course it was only a chance that I happened to be touching elbows with the child, and naturally I only did what anyone would have done in the same circ.u.mstances, but the whole family were tremendously grateful and made a great pother over it. By the way, speaking of rescues, have you heard about the thing that happened to the two Van Norden girls at Bailey"s Beach last week? I must tell you about that."
Presently they both were surprised to find that forty-five minutes had pa.s.sed. Mr. Murrill said they had better be getting along; he made so bold as to venture the suggestion that possibly Mrs. Propbridge might want to go to her rooms before the automobile party arrived, to change her frock or something. Not that he personally thought she should change it. If he might be pardoned for saying so, he thought it a most becoming frock; but women were curious about such things, now honestly weren"t they? And Mrs. Propbridge was constrained to confess that about such things women were curious. She had a conviction that if all things moved smoothly she presently would be urged to waive formality and join the party at luncheon. Mr. Murrill had not exactly put the idea into words yet, but she sensed that the thought of offering the invitation was in his mind. In any event the impending meeting called for efforts on her part to appear at her best.
"I believe I will run up to our rooms for a few minutes before your friends arrive," she said as they arose from the bench. "I want to freshen up a bit."
"Quite so," he a.s.sented.
He left her at the doors of the Churchill-Fontenay, saying he would idle about and watch for the others in case they should arrive ahead of time.
Ten minutes later, while she was still trying to make a choice between three frocks, her telephone rang. She answered the ring; it was Mr.
Murrill, who was at the other end of the line. He was distressed to have to tell her that word had just reached him that on the way down from Philadelphia General Dunlap had been taken suddenly ill--an attack of acute indigestion, perhaps, or possibly a touch of the sun--and the motor trip had been halted at a small town on the mainland fifteen miles back of Gulf Stream City. He was starting immediately for the town in a car with a physician. He trusted the general"s indisposition was not really serious but of course the party would be called off; and the invalid would return to Philadelphia as soon as he felt well enough to move. He was awfully sorry--Mr. Murrill was--terribly put out, and all that sort of thing; hoped that another opportunity might be vouchsafed him of meeting Mrs. Propbridge; he had enjoyed tremendously meeting her under these unconventional circ.u.mstances; and now he must go.
It was not to be denied that young Mrs. Propbridge felt distinctly disappointed. The start of the little adventure had had promise in it.
She had forecast all manner of agreeable contingencies as the probable outcome.
For some reason, though, or perhaps for no definite reason at all, she said nothing to her husband, on his return from Toledo, of her encounter with the agreeable Mr. Murrill. Anyway, he arrived in no very affable state of mind. As a matter of fact he was most terrifically out of temper. Somebody or other--presumably some a.s.s of a practical joker, he figured, or possibly a person with a grudge against him who had curious methods of taking vengeance--had lured him into taking a hot, dusty, tiresome and entirely useless trip. There was no business conference on out at Toledo; no need for his presence there. If he could lay hands on the idiot who had sent him that forged telegram--well, the angered Mr.
Propbridge indicated with a gesture of a large and k.n.o.bby fist what he would do to the aforesaid idiot.
The next time Mr. Propbridge was haled to the broiling Corn Belt he made very sure that the warrant was genuine. One of these wild-goose chases a summer was quite enough for a man with a size-nineteen collar and a forty-six-inch waistband.
The next time befell some ten days after the Propbridges returned from the sh.o.r.e to their thirty-thousand-dollars-a-year apartment on Upper Park Avenue. The very fact that they did live in an apartment and that they did spend a good part of their time there would stamp them for what they were--persons not yet to be included among the really fashionable group. The really fashionable maintained large homes which they occupied when they came to town to have dental work done or to launch a debutante daughter into society; the rest of the year they usually were elsewhere.
It was the thing.
Business of importance sent Mr. Propbridge to Detroit, and then on to Chicago and Des Moines. On a certain afternoon he caught the Wolverine Limited. Almost before his train had pa.s.sed One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street Mrs. Propbridge had a caller. She was informed that a member of the staff of that live paper, People You Know, desired to see her for a few minutes. Persons of social consequence or persons who craved to be of social consequence did not often deny themselves to representatives of People You Know. Mrs. Propbridge told the switchboard girl downstairs to tell the hallman to invite the gentleman to come up.
He proved to be a somewhat older man than she had expected to see. He was well dressed enough, but about him was something hard and forbidding, almost formidable in fact. Yet there was a soothing, conciliatory tone in his voice when he spoke.
"Mrs. Propbridge," he began, "my name is Townsend. I am one of the editors of People You Know. I might have sent one of our reporters to see you, but in a matter so important--and so delicate as this one is--I felt it would be better if I came personally to have a little talk with you and get your side of the affair for publication."
"My side of what affair?" she asked, puzzled.
He lifted one lip in a cornerwise smile.
"Let me give you a little advice, Mrs. Propbridge," he said. "I"ve had a lot of experience in such matters as these. The interested parties will be better off if they"re perfectly frank in talking to the press. Then all misunderstandings are avoided and everybody gets a fair deal in print. Don"t you agree with me that I am right?"
"You may be right," she said, "but I haven"t the least idea what you are talking about."
"I mean your trouble with your husband--if you force me to speak plainly; I"d like to have your statement, that"s all."
"But I haven"t had any trouble with my husband!" she said. Her amazement made her voice shrill. "My husband and I are living together in perfect happiness. You"ve made a mistake."
"No chance," he said, and suddenly his manner changed from the sympathetic to the accusing. "Mrs. Propbridge, we have exclusive advance information from reliable sources--a straight tip--that the proof against you is about to be turned over to your husband and we"ve every reason to believe that when he gets it in his hands he"s going to sue you for divorce, naming as corespondent a certain middle-aged man. Do you mean to tell me you don"t know anything about that?"
"Of course I mean to! Why, you"re crazy! You"re--"
"Wait just one minute please," he interrupted the distressed lady. "Wait until I get through telling you how much I know already; then you"ll see that denials won"t help you any. As a matter of fact we"re ready now to go ahead and spring the story in next week"s issue, but I thought it was only fair to come to you and give you a chance to make your defense in print--if you care to make one."
"I still tell you that you"ve made a terrible mistake," she declared.
Her anger began to stir within her, as indignation succeeded to astonishment. "How dare you come here accusing me of doing anything wrong!"
"I"m accusing you of nothing. I"m only going by the plain evidence. I might be lying to you. Other people might lie to you. But, madam, photographs don"t lie. That"s why they"re the best possible evidence in a divorce court. And I"ve seen the evidence. I"ve got it in my pocket right now."
"Evidence against me? Photographs of me?"
"Sure. Photographs of you and the gray-haired party." He reached in a breast pocket and brought out a thin sheaf of unmounted photographs and handed them to her. "Mrs. Propbridge, just take a look at these and then tell me if you blame me for a.s.suming that there"s bound to be trouble when your husband sees them?"
She looked, and her twirling brain told her it was all a nightmare, but her eyes told her it was not. Here were five photographs, enlarged snapshots apparently: One, a profile view, showing her standing on a boardwalk, her hand held in the hand of the man she had known as Valentine C. Murrill; one, a quartering view, revealing them riding together in a wheel chair, their heads close together, she smiling and he apparently whispering something of a pleasing and confidential nature to her, the posture of both almost intimate; one, a side view, showing the pair of them emerging from an open-fronted cafe--she recognized the facade of the place where they had found the orangeades so disappointing--and in this picture Mr. Murrill had been caught by the camera as he was saying something of seeming mutual interest, for she was glancing up sidewise at him and he had lowered his head until his lips almost touched her ear; one, showing them sitting at a small round table with a wine bottle and gla.s.ses in front of them and behind them a background suggesting the interior of a rather shabby drinking place, a distinct impression of sordidness somehow conveyed; and one, a rear view, showing them upon a bench alongside a seemingly deserted wooden structure of some sort, and in this one the man had been snapped in the very act of putting his arms about her and drawing her toward him.
That was all--merely five oblong slips of chemically printed paper, and yet on the face of them they told a d.a.m.ning and a condemning story.
She stared at them, she who was absolutely innocent of thought or intent of wrong-doing, and could feel the fabric of her domestic life trembling before it came crashing down.
"Oh, but this is too horrible for words!" the distressed lady cried out. "How could anybody have been so cruel, so malicious, as to follow us and waylay us and catch us in these positions? It"s monstrous!"