"I'm in the last car but one," Lucinda told him sweetly--"Section Ten."

She made her way back to that reservation determined to lose no time about interviewing the conductor. But the porter failed to answer repeated pressures on the call-b.u.t.ton, and at length surmising the truth, that he was getting his own breakfast, Lucinda resigned herself to wait. There was plenty of time....

Now that she was extricated from it the comic element in her late rencontre began to make irresistible appeal. She picked up a book, opened it, bent her head low above it to hide smiling lips and dancing eyes from people pa.s.sing in the aisle; but was not well settled in this pose when she heard a joyful cry--"Cindy! Cindy Druce!"--and rose, dropping the book in her astonishment, to be enfolded in the arms of f.a.n.n.y Lontaine.

XVIII

"I feel," Lucinda confessed, "precisely like a weathervane in a whirlwind, I mean the way it ought to: every few minutes I find my nose pointing in a new direction."

"You dear!" Seated opposite her at the windows of the Lontaine drawing-room, f.a.n.n.y leaned over and squeezed her hand affectionately. "I can't tell you how happy I am that pretty nose is pointing now the same way as ours."

"And I, f.a.n.n.y. It's really a wonderful sensation, you know, after all that worry and uncertainty, to know one's life is mapped ahead for a few days at least. I don't believe any lost puppy ever felt more friendless than I did just before we met, when I thought I was going to get off at Kansas City. And my present frame of mind is that same puppy's when it finds itself all at once adopted by a family that likes animals."

Kansas City was already the idle menace of a dimming dream. Awkward but unavoidable explanations, haltingly offered, had been accepted without question: a manifestation of tactful sympathy which had not only won Lucinda's heart completely but, working together with her reluctance to proceed to Reno before she could feel reasonably sure of being suffered to live there unmolested, had influenced her to agree to go on with the Lontaines to Los Angeles; whither (she was tacitly led to infer) his motion-picture interests had peremptorily called Lontaine.

It seemed a sensible move as well as one most agreeable in prospect. She could rest in comfort and friendly companionship for a few weeks, consult with Harford Willis by letter, at leisure and with a calm mind plan for the future. She now saw, as if new light had somehow been cast upon her problems by this meeting of happy chance, that there was really no hurry, no reason why she shouldn't take her time about the unpleasant business, attend to its transaction only when and as it suited her will and convenience. It wasn't as if she wanted to remarry, or was in any way dependent upon Bel and must beg the courts to make him provide for her. If anything, her personal resources exceeded Bellamy's.

And then it would be amusing to see Los Angeles under the wing of so well-informed a motion-picture impresario as Lontaine. That afternoon at the Culp studios had been fascinating; how much more so would it be to live for a time in a city that was, at least as Lontaine limned it, one vast open-air studio, to be a.s.sociated with people who were actually doing something with their lives. What a change from the life that had grown to seem tedious and unprofitable even before Bellamy had made its continuance intolerable!

"But you haven't told me," she complained, "about those tests. Did you go to see them that day? How did they come out? How did I look?"

"Oh, Cindy! what a shame you missed it. You were adorable, everybody simply raved about you."

"Fact, Mrs. Druce. You outcla.s.sed even Alma Daley in that Palm Room scene. No, but seriously: it was you first, Miss Daley second, f.a.n.n.y a good third, the rest nowhere. You missed scoring no end of a personal triumph in the projection-room. Though, if you ask me, Miss Daley was just as well pleased."

"You're making fun of me."

"Absolutely not."

"Well, it's hard to believe, but if you mean it, the Culps and their cameraman would seem to have been right."

"Oh, I'd almost forgotten!" f.a.n.n.y cried. "Mr. Culp was terribly put out because you weren't there, and made me promise faithfully to ask you to call him up and make an appointment for another private showing."

"Right about what?" Lontaine earnestly wanted to know.

"Why, they were so sure I would screen well, as they put it, Mr. Culp made me an offer, as we were leaving, to act with his wife in her next picture."

Lontaine's eyes widened into a luminous blue stare; and abruptly, as if to hide the thought behind them, he threw away a half-smoked cigarette and, helping himself to another, bent forward, tapping it on a thumb-nail.

"Really, dearest? How priceless! And what did you say to the creature?"

"Oh, I was kind but firm."

"Ben Culp's a big man in the cinema game," Lontaine commented without looking up. "His advice is worth something, Mrs. Druce. If he says you'd make a hit, you might do worse than listen to him. That is, of course, if you should ever think of taking a flyer in the motion-picture business."

"I'm not even dreaming of such a thing. Why, it's absurd!"

"I'll wager you wouldn't say so if you once saw yourself on the screen.

Only wish I had a print of those tests to show you."

"I'm not curious."

"Then you're the modern miracle, Mrs. Druce--a woman without either vanity or a secret ambition to be a cinema star." Lontaine laughed and lazily got up. "I can only say you've got a chance to make a name for yourself I wouldn't overlook if I stood in your shoes.... But if you'll excuse me now, think I'll roll along and arrange matters with the conductor and porters."

"You're too good to me," Lucinda protested. "I know I'm imposing----"

"Absolutely nothing in that. Only too happy."

The door was behind Lucinda's shoulder. Closing it, unseen by her, Lontaine contrived to exchange with his wife a look of profound significance. Then he lounged thoughtfully forward to the club car and delayed there, in deep abstraction, long enough to smoke two cigarettes before proceeding to hunt up and interview the conductor about Lucinda's change of destination, then instruct the porters to shift her luggage to the Lontaine drawing-room and his own effects to the section she was vacating.

Into making this move Lucinda had been talked against her half-hearted demurs. She knew very well it wasn't the right thing to do, to take advantage of their kindness of heart, to separate husband and wife; but they wouldn't listen to her; and after all it was hardly in human nature to undergo again the ordeal of the open sleeping-car by night if one might by any means avoid it; while Lontaine insisted he wouldn't mind in the least.

"I'm an old hand at travelling under any and all conditions," he had a.s.serted--"accustomed to roughing it, you know. Even upper berths hold no terrors for me, while a whole section is simply sybaritic sensuality.

If one hadn't brought f.a.n.n.y along, it would never have entered the old bean to do oneself better than a lower. Absolutely. You don't imagine Fan and I could rest in comfort, knowing you were unhappy back there?

Rather not!"

In point of fact, Lontaine had been at once eager to earn Lucinda's favour and not at all averse to a move which promised more personal liberty than one could command penned up in a stuffy coop with one's wife. Oh, not that he wasn't fond enough of Fan, but--well, when all was said, one was bound to admit Fan was a bit, you know, American. Not to put too fine a point on it, decidedly American. n.o.body's fool, Fan. Had a head on her shoulders and used it, and a way of looking at one, besides, as if she were actually looking through one, now and then, that made one feel positively ratty. Chap could do with an occasional furlough from that sort of thing.

It wasn't as if they were still lovers, you see. Rough going, the devil's own luck and mutual disappointment had put rather a permanent crimp into the first fine raptures. They got along well enough nowadays, to be sure, but it was no good pretending that either couldn't have done just as well alone. But then it had hardly been in the first place what one might call a love match. Oh, yes, tremendously taken with each other, and all that; but if you put it to the test of cold facts, the truth was, Fan had married with an eye to that distant t.i.tle, whose remoteness the War had so inconsiderately failed to abridge, while Lontaine had been quite as much influenced by Fan's filial relationship to a fortune of something like eighty millions. But that hope, too, had long since gone glimmering.

Rotten form, not to say vicious, on the part of the Terror of the Wheat Pit, to cut off his only begotten daughter with a shilling, one meant to say its equivalent measured by the bulk of his wealth. The legacy Fan had picked up in Chicago would have been barely enough to satisfy their joint and several creditors. Not that one was mad enough to fritter the money away like that. But if this Los Angeles venture were to turn out a bloomer....

But why antic.i.p.ate the worst? Buck up and consider the widely advertised silver lining.... A bit of luck, falling in with this Druce girl, under the circ.u.mstances. No question about the solid establishment of her financial standing: the good old Rock of Gibraltar was a reed in the wind by comparison.... Now if only one dared count on Fan's being amenable to reason, grasping the logical possibilities, doing her bit like a sensible little woman....

Seated in Section 10, waiting for the porter to bring back his personal impedimenta from the drawing-room, Harry Lontaine turned a handsome face to the window, frowning absently, the nervous frown of a man whose cleverness has never proved quite equal to the task of satisfying appet.i.tes at once strong and fastidious.

By degrees its place was taken by a look of dreaming: Lontaine was viewing not the dreary wastes of Kansan lands under the iron rule of Winter but a California of infatuate imagining, a land all smiling in the shine of a benign sun, set with groves of orange trees and olives, dotted with picturesque bungalows whose white walls were relieved by the living green of vines, and peopled by a race of blessed beings born to a heritage of lifelong beauty, youth, and love-in-idleness; a land in whose charmed soil fortunes grew of seeds of careless sowing, and through whose scenes of subtropical loveliness prophetic vision descried a heroic figure moving, courted and applauded by happy, unenvious mult.i.tudes, the figure of Harry Lontaine, Esq., newest but mightiest overlord of the cinema....

From this delectable realm the dreamer was recalled by consciousness of somebody standing in the aisle and staring impertinently. Racial shyness erased all signs of wistfulness in one instant and cloaked sensitiveness in a guise of glacial arrogance; in another, recognition dawned, and hauteur was in turn discarded and a more approachable mien set up in its stead. Lontaine was too diligent a student of motion-pictures not to know at sight the features of Lynn Summerlad, by long odds the most popular male star of the American cinema. A personage worth knowing....

Misreading his expression, Mr. Summerlad felt called upon to apologize.

"Beg your pardon, but I was expecting to find a lady in this section, I may say a friend: a Mrs. Druce. Do you by any chance----?"

XIX

Bridge killed the long hours of that first afternoon on board a train whose windows revealed seldom a prospect less desolate than one of prairie meadows fallowed but frozen, dusky beneath a tarnished sky: a still and roomy land s.p.a.ciously fenced, scored by rare roads that knew no turning, but ran like ruled diameters of the wide ring of the horizon: the wheat-bin of the world swept and garnished by winter winds.

Lynn Summerlad made a fourth at the table set up in the Lontaine drawing-room; invited by Lontaine as an acquaintance of Lucinda's and a grateful addition to the party because he played something better than merely a good game.

Not only "fearfully easy to look at" (as f.a.n.n.y confided to Lucinda) but fair spoken and well if at times a shade carefully mannered, he was intelligent and ready of wit; so that, when he proved these qualities by not forcing himself upon the trio at or after dinner, he was missed; and Lucinda, while she waited for sleep to blind her eyes that night, discovered that she was looking forward to the next afternoon, when Bridge would be again in order and infeasible without the fourth.