Chapter XV

The door opened and Dick stepped into the room,

"Jiminy, here's the returned husband!" said May, absent-mindedly returning to Jim's lap.

"Well, where do we go from here?" she asked. "This party's all rain from this point on. I can see that!"

Gloria couldn't think. Her mind was utterly blank.

"Hello, Dick, old man!" Jim Carewe said heartily.

"Hello, Dick," May echoed. "We've been cheering up Gloria in your absence."

"So I see." Dick's voice was cold and hard. His eyes traveled from Gloria to Wayburn, smiling nonchalantly.

Dick's face was white. Gloria was struck by his pallor. Even his lips were whitish gray. Beads of cold sweat were on his forehead.

"Dick, you're sick!" she exclaimed. She went to him, and took his hand. It was cold and clammy.

Dick jerked his thumb in the direction of May and Jim.

"Get them out! Get rid of them!" he said, looking at Gloria.

She held her hands out helplessly to May.

"May dear, I hope you realize that Dick isn't himself. He's sick," she said. "So just don't say anything, but go ... and send Dr. John over here, will you, please? As soon as you get home?"

Dick walked past her. He stood, scowling and threatening, before Wayburn. The actor rose, and faced him.

"Well, what's your trouble?" Stan asked.

Gloria rushed to him.

"Stan, please don't quarrel with him! Can't you see how sick he is? ... He doesn't know what he's doing!" she pleaded.

Dick laughed contemptuously.

"Oh, I know what I'm doing, all right," he said. "Don't worry about me! ... What I want to know is what this fellow is doing in my house! Who asked him to come here ... you?"

He turned to Gloria and seized her with one hand. His fingers hurt her flesh. She could feel that he trembled violently.

Gloria tossed her head willfully.

"Yes, I did ask Mr. Wayburn here!" she answered. "Was that such a terrible thing to do? ... To have a few friends in to cheer me up? You hike off on a business trip, never suggesting that I go along! Never thinking that I might possibly be lonely here! And then you get sore because I don't spend my time crying over it!"

She pulled herself away from Dick.

He turned toward the hall. May and Jim stood there, still, waiting to see what was going to happen.

"May, this is your doing," Dick said, his voice trembling. He put one hand on the back of a tall Jacobean chair to steady himself.

"You know that everybody in town is talking about you and Jim," he went on, "so you want to drag my wife down to your own level.... Well, you're not going to do it! I forbid you ever to come here again! You, or your lover, either! Now get out ... both of you!"

May burst into careless laughter.

"Oh, we're going, but not because you say so! We were just leaving when you came," she cried gayly. "And don't you be so sure that I framed this little party to-day. Ask your wife whose idea it was! ... Come along, Jimmy!"

The pair of them went, leaving a dead silence in the house behind them.

At last Dick broke it.

"Gloria, I wouldn't have believed it of you," he said, mopping his damp forehead. His eyes were fixed on his wife. Gloria, with bent head, stood in the doorway.

Both she and Dick seemed to have forgotten that Stanley Wayburn was still in the room.

"I don't see what there is to make such a fuss about," Gloria said, pouting childishly. "There's nothing so disgraceful about my having two or three people in to tea, in broad daylight, is there?"

"Tea?" Dick gave a short laugh. "The house smells like a distillery, not a tea-room! ... Was it tea you were drinking from those highball glasses?"

He indicated the two empty ones that stood on his smoking-stand.

"Oh, Jim brought that stuff along. You know how he thinks he has to drink every five minutes or he isn't having a good time!" Gloria said easily. "Stan and I really didn't want any of it."

Stan and I! ... Dick turned and looked intently at Wayburn as if he had just seen him for the first time in his life. Under the cold steady gaze, Stan shifted uneasily in his chair.

He put out one hand, and chose a fresh cigarette from the silver box beside him. With seeming carelessness, he struck a match to it. He leaned back, puffing idly.

But his wary eyes never left Dick's face.

Gloria felt as if time, itself, had stopped. She held her breath.

Her eyes went first to one man, then to the other. She could see that each was taking the other's measure ... like two prize fighters in the ring.

Suddenly she remembered that Dick had once told her that he had a savage temper. He had said that the reason he never fought with people was because he was afraid of his own physical violence when his blood was up ... because he was afraid he might injure his adversary without fully knowing what he was doing!

She had scarcely believed him then. She saw now that it was the truth that he had told her about himself.

His hands were tensed so that they had whitened along the knuckles.

Gloria could tell from the set of his jaw that his teeth were tight-clenched. His face was ashen.

She saw that he was deaf, blind and numb to everything but his own anger ... that he was quite capable of killing Wayburn then and there!

She could scarcely recognize in him the quiet, self-contained Dick she had always known ... the husband who had pampered and spoiled her.

With a kind of horror Gloria watched him slowly cross the room and stand before his own armchair, where Wayburn sat smoking. Fascinated, she waited, not daring to move a muscle.

What was he going to do?

But Dick did nothing. He stood perfectly quiet, looking down at the actor. Gloria saw that the hand that held Wayburn's cigarette was shaking.

Finally Dick's voice cut the stillness like a knife-edge. "Wayburn, you ... well, never mind what you are! But I know and so do you! And I know what you're doing here!" Dick said. "I know what my wife's doing here, with you! ... And that's all ended!"

Stan's mouth went up at one corner in his crooked smile. He flicked the ash from his cigarette before he answered. But Gloria could see that he was terribly afraid ... that he needed all his acting ability to carry him through this crisis.

"Is that so?" Wayburn asked, carelessly.

Dick turned to his wife.

"Go upstairs while we settle this thing!" he ordered her.

Gloria braced herself. She shook her head, slowly.

"No, I won't go upstairs!" she said. "All this concerns me as much as it does you.... Only you're so silly to make a scene about such a trifle! Why, I don't begin to see as much of Stan as you do of your Miss Briggs every day! ... How do I know you started away on a business trip at all? How do I know that you weren't somewhere with her all day? ... It looks pretty queer to me—your rushing back here when you were supposed to be out of town! Mighty queer!"

Dick's mouth tightened.

"Get upstairs!" he said savagely. His voice was like a whip.

Without another word, Gloria went.

She fairly flew up the long flight, and stopped at the top to listen. There was no sound from the floor below.

In sudden panic, she flew into the room that she and Dick shared and locked the door behind her.

There was a high excitement in her.

It was the sort of thrill that a cave-woman might have felt thousands of years ago, as she watched two stone-age warriors fighting to the death over her.

She laughed wildly and hysterically.

"Oh, if he were only like that always!" she thought. She shivered at the memory of Dick's righteous anger ... the cold fury in his eyes when he had ordered her upstairs. He had never seemed so splendid.

And she had obeyed him! ... For the first time in her life she had obeyed him! ... She was mortally afraid of him, too!

The telephone on the table beside her bed rang sharply.

"Hello, dear." It was May's voice. "I just called up to see if you were all right. Has your lord and master calmed down, yet?"

"No, he's still ranting around, downstairs," Gloria answered, "but I think he's awfully sick ... really, I do, May. He looks it. I think that's how he happened to come home ahead of time. He said this morning that he was going to be gone two or three days."

"Don't kid me, Birdie.... I'm simple," May answered in her cheerful slang. "I'll bet you a new spring hat that he had a hunch you'd throw a little party as soon as he was gone, and he came home unexpectedly to find out.... Well, you didn't disappoint him, did you, dear?"

She laughed. Nothing in the world was serious to May but her clothes, her complexion, and her good times!

"No, you're wrong for once, May," Gloria gravely told her. "Dick wouldn't spy on me. He's too honest and above-board, himself.... I'm sure he's sick. Will you please ask Dr. John to come over and have a look at him? Dick's never been quite well since he had the flu before Christmas, you know."

"John's not at home, although I expect him any minute," May answered. "You might try to reach him at his office."

She rang off. Gloria called Dr. John's office. He answered the phone, himself.

"Will you stop in here to see Dick for a minute on your way home?" Gloria asked him. "He came home sick a while ago."

There was a long silence.

"I don't understand, Gloria," Dr. John said at last. "I just saw Dick half an hour ago. He stopped in at my office on his way from the train, looking pretty shaky. I told him to go home and go to bed ... and that I'd look in on him again, after dinner."

"Oh, I didn't know that," Gloria faltered. "Well, come now, anyway, will you? Please?"

She was afraid to be alone in the house with Dick, after Wayburn had gone. She wished that she had not given Ranghild the afternoon off.

"I'll be there inside of fifteen minutes," Dr. John promised. Gloria could tell he was puzzled.

Swiftly she took off her blue gown and slipped the silver band from her hair. She took a plain black dress from her closet and put it on. For she fervently hoped that Dick had not noticed how she had decorated herself for Wayburn's visit!

Gloria picked a buffer up from her dressing-table and ran it idly across her shining nails.

She was thinking hard. She began to wonder if Stanley Wayburn was worth all the trouble that he brought into her, life ... the heartbreak, the jealousy, and the lies....

He had seemed a despicable coward downstairs just now, when Dick had faced him with that deadly anger of his. Gloria had seen the fear in Stan's eyes, even when his lips were curled into a sneering smile.

Here she was ... risking everything to be with him, and she wasn't even sure that he loved her. She couldn't make him say that he cared for her!

Despair swept over Gloria.

Ah, if she only knew! If she could only be sure that Stan loved her ... nothing else would matter to her then! Nothing!

Gloria threw the buffer down among the silver boxes and brushes on her dressing-table. She unlocked the door of the bedroom.

Without making a sound she crept down the stairs to the landing. She leaned over the banisters and listened.

The two men were just coming out of the living-room. Dick was talking in that same cold monotone. Gloria caught the end of a sentence.

"... never again so long as you live," he was saying. "And now, get out!"

Wayburn came into Gloria's range of vision. She could see that he was still smiling. Outwardly he was debonair.

"Very well, I'll go," he said in a slow, leisurely way.

Gloria heard the front door close behind him.

Gloria was certain that the minute the door had closed upon Stanley Wayburn, Dick would come rushing upstairs to hear what she had to say in her own defense. Trembling, she waited....

She ran upstairs and bolted the door of her bedroom. She was sure she heard the handle of the door turn, and then Dick's footsteps going down the stairs.

Gloria presently tiptoed down the stairs and peered between the blue velvet curtains that hung in the doorway.

Dick was sitting in one corner of the davenport. His head was sunk in his thin brown hands.

Gloria thought she heard him give a low groan. But she was not sure whether he did or not.

A sudden rush of pity for him swept over her like a wave. For he must love her the way she cared for Stanley Wayburn ... hopelessly and helplessly!

... And yet Gloria knew that in time she would have forgotten all about Stanley Wayburn if he had not come back. She had all but put him out of her heart during the months before her marriage to Dick.

And why had he had to come back to spoil Dick's life and hers, too? For Gloria was certain that, in a mild sort of way, she would have been quite contented to be Dick's wife all the rest of her days ... if she had not seen Stan again.... He had always been able to sweep her off her feet!