At eleven o'clock a small, watery moon cut through a sky that was fleecily clouded--a swift moon that rode fast as a ship. It rode over but did not light Squire Gerber's one-and-a-half-storied, weathered-gray, and set-slightly-in-a-hollow house on Claxton countryside.

Three motor-cars, their engines chugging out into wide areas of stillness, stood processional at the curb. A red hall light showed against the door-pane and two lower-story windows were widely illuminated.

Within that room of chromos and the cold horsehair smell of unaired years, silence, except for the singing of three gas-jets, had momentarily fallen, a dozen or so flushed faces, grotesquely sobered, staring through the gaseous fog, the fluttering lids of a magistrate whose lips habitually fluttered, just lifting from his book.

A hysterical catch of breath from Miss Vera de Long broke the ear-splitting silence. She reached out, the three plumes dipping down the bare V of her back, for the limp hand of the bride.

"Gawd bless you, dearie; it's a big night's work!"

In the tallest part of St. Louis, its busiest thoroughfares inclosing it in a rectangle, the Hotel Sherman, where traveling salesmen with real alligator bags and third-finger diamonds habitually shake their first Pullman dust, rears eighteen stories up through and above an aeriality of soft-coal smoke, which fits over the rim of the city like a skull-cap.

In the Louis Quinze, gilt-bedded, gilt-framed, gilt-edged bridal-suite _de luxe_ on the seventeenth floor, Mrs. Charley c.o.x sat rigid enough and in shirt-waisted incongruity on the lower curl of a gilt divan that squirmed to represent the letter S.

"Charley--are you--sorry?"

He wriggled out of his dust-coat, tossing it on the gilt-canopied bed and crossed to her, lifting off her red sailor.

"Now that's a fine question for a ten-hours' wifey to ask her hubby, ain't it? Am I sorry, she asks me before the wedding crowd has turned the corner.

Lord, honey, I never expected anything like you to happen to me!"

She stroked his coat-sleeve, mouthing back tears.

"Now everybody'll say--you're a goner--for sure--marrying a--Popular Store girl."

"If anybody got the worst of this bargain, it's my girl."

"My own boy," she said, still battling with tears.

"You drew a black sheep, honey, but I say again and again, 'Thank G.o.d, you drew one with golden fleece!'"

"That--that's the trouble, Charley--there's just no way to make a boy with money know you married him for any other reason."

"I'm not blaming you, honey. Lord! what have I got besides money to talk for me?"

"Lots. Why--like Jess says, Charley, when you get to squaring your lips and jerking up your head, there's nothing in the world you can't do that you set out to do."

"Well, I'm going to set out to make the stiff-necks of this town turn to look at my girl, all right. I'm going to buy you a chain of diamonds that'll dazzle their eyes out; I'm--"

"Charley, Charley, that's not what I want, boy. Now that I've got you, there ain't a chain of diamonds on earth I'd turn my wrist for."

"Yes, there is, girl; there's a string of pear-shaped ones in--"

"I want you to buck up, honey; that's the finest present you can give me. I want you to buck up like you didn't have a cent to your name. I want you to throw up your head the way you do when you mean business, and show that Charley c.o.x, without a cent to his name, would be--"

"Would be what, honey?"

"A winner. You got brains, Charley--if only you'd have gone through school and shown them. If you'd only have taken education, Charley, and not got fired out of all the academies, my boy would beat 'em all. Lord! boy, there's not a day pa.s.ses over my head I don't wish for education. That's why I'm so crazy my little sister Genevieve should get it. I'd have took to education like a fish to water if I'd have had the chance, and there you were, Charley, with every private school in town and pa.s.sed 'em up."

"I know, girl, just looks like every steer I gave myself was the wrong steer till it was too late to get in right again. Bad egg, I tell you, honey."

"Too late! Why, Charley--and you not even thirty-one yet? With your brains and all--too late! You make me laugh. If only you will--why, I'm game to go out West, Charley, on a ranch, where you can find your feet and learn to stand on them. You got stuff in you, you have. Jess Turner says you was always first in school, and when you set your jaw there wasn't nothing you couldn't get on top of. If you'd have had a mother and--and a father that wasn't the meanest old man in town, dear, and had known how to raise a hot-headed boy like you, you'd be famous now instead of notorious--that's what you'd be."

He patted her yellow hair, tilting her head back against his arm, pinching her cheeks together and kissing her puckered mouth.

"Dream on, honey. I like you crazy, too."

"But, honey, I--"

"You married this millionaire kid, and, bless your heart, he's going to make good by showing you the color of his coin!"

"Charley!"

She sprang back from the curve of his embrace, unshed tears immediately distilled.

"Why, honey--I didn't mean it that way! I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. What I meant was--'sh-h-h-h, Loo--all I meant was, it's coming to you. Where'd the fun be if I couldn't make this town point up its ears at my girl? n.o.body knows any better than your hubby what his Loo was cut out for. She was cut out for queening it, and I'm going to see that she gets what's her due. Wouldn't be surprised if the papers have us already. Let's see what we'll give them with their coffee this morning."

He unfolded his fresh sheet, shaking it open with one hand and still holding her in the cove of his arm.

"Guess we missed the first edition, but they'll get us sure."

She peered at the sheet over his shoulder, her cheek against his and still sobbing a bit in her throat. The jerking of her breath stopped then; in fact, it was as if both their breathing had let down with the oneness of a clock stopped.

It was she who moved first, falling back from him, her mouth dropping open slightly.

He let the paper fall between his wide-spread knees, the blood flowing down from his face and seeming to leave him leaner.

"Charley--Charley--darling!"

"My--poor old man!" he said in a voice that might have been his echo in a cave.

"He--his heart must have give out on him, Charley, while he slept in the night."

"My--poor--old--man!"

She stretched out her hand timidly to his shoulder.

"Charley--boy--my poor boy!"

He reached up to cover her timid touch, still staring ahead, as if a mental apathy had clutched him.

"He died like--he--lived. Gad--it's--tough!"

"It--it wasn't your fault, darling. G.o.d forgive me for speaking against the dead, but--everybody knows he was a hard man, Charley--the way he used to beat you up instead of showing you the right way. Poor old man, I guess he didn't know--"