Ex Libris

Orma F. Butler








TWO FLIGHTS UP


TWO FLIGHTS UP
A MARY(ROBERTS) RINEHART
AUTHOR OP
THE MAN IN LOWER TEN,
THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE,
DANGEROUS DAYS, ETC.
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK


copyrjgrt, 1918, by doorleday, doran *
COMPANY, INC COmiCHT, IO26, BY THB
CONSOLIDATED MAGAZINE CORPORATION (THB
REP ROOK MAGAZINE). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT TBS
COUNTRY Un PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.


r
TWO FLIGHTS UP





CHAPTER ONE
ANSWERING THE FRONT DOOR AT THE
Bayne house was a lengthy matter. The post-
man had learned this long ago, and now he
merely laid the mail in the vestibule and went
away.
First, Mrs. Bayne would look in the old re-
flecting mirror which still hung from her bed-
room window and take note of the ringer. Then
she would whisper cautiously over the stair
rail:
"It's the milk bill. I'm not in." Or, as had
been happening more and more frequently for
the last six months: "It's Furness, Holly. Come
right up, and I'll send down your Aunt Mar-
garet to receive him."
And Margaret, who was Mrs. Bayne's sister,
would put down the napkins she was hemming
by hand for a department store and sulkily take
off her apron and smooth her hair. The fore-
finger of her left hand was roughened with the
needle, although she kept a piece of pumice
i


TWO FLIGHTS UP
came in; and to cover the sounds of stealthy
movements overhead Margaret would make
conversation. For instance:
"I saw Mrs. Rodney White downtown the
other day. She's growing very stout, isn't she?"
"Eats too much," Mr. Brooks would say
calmly. "By the way, I heard a good story about
him last night. The other day at the Rossiters'
dinner, he . . ." And so on.
Margaret would listen absorbedly. Mr.
Brooks had an endless fund of gossip which
Margaret would absorb as eagerly as perhaps
Eve may have listened to whispers about her
lost Paradise. Every evening he dined some-
where, but always with the Right People, of
course, and until the last six months he had
been accustomed to wander, after business
hours, from one tea table to another.
Not that he cared for tea. As a matter of
fact, he loathed tea. But there was always talk
and sometimes whisky and soda, and he man-
aged to pick up quite a little of both. He was a
tall, rather thin young man; as Mrs. Bayne
said, he was not handsome, but he was dis-
tinguished. As a matter of fact, he was neither.
For the last six months, however, he had
been calling at Kelsey Street instead. There was
3


TWO FLIGHTS UP
no whisky and soda there, only tea. However,
there was Holly. Her full name was Hollister,
which had been her mother's; after Mrs.
Bayne's—well, what you might term widow-
hood, she had been strongly tempted to call
herself Mrs. Hollister Bayne, but Margaret
had been so absurd about it that she had not.
In the drawing room the tea table would
be ready. Mrs. Bayne always laid it after
luncheon, before she went upstairs for what
she termed her siesta. It was only necessary in
case of a caller to light the spirit kettle, and
"not bother to ring." Furness Brooks had been
coming twice a week for months, and he had
not yet discovered that the Baynes kept no
servant. Margaret Hollister would put a match
to the lamp under the kettle, and then ooze out.
"If you don't mind, I have some notes to
write. And I'll tell Holly you're here."
But on the October day this story opens, the
routine had been changed. Mrs. Bayne, dressed
in black silk, had sat all morning in the draw-
ing room and most of the afternoon, and in the
third-story front room Holly was working like
a young fury. Only Margaret continued grimly
to hem napkins, holding them close to her eyes;
she needed glasses, but specialists were expen-
sive.
4


TWO FLIGHTS UP
It was one of Mrs. Bayne's pet fictions that if
dear Margaret did not do so much "fancy work"
she would have fewer headaches.
When at last the doorbell rang, the sounds
on the third floor ceased, and the hush of gen-
tility descended on the house. It rang a second
time before Mrs. Bayne moved. Then, picking
up a book and inserting a finger in it, she went
to the front door and opened it. A burly young
man was standing outside.
"I thought I heard the bell," said Mrs. Bayne
graciously, looking back over her shoulder for
an imaginary servant. "Really, these days ..."
She looked again at the young man. He
seemed respectable but not particularly affluent.
Not that he was shabby, of course, but com-
pared with the spick-and-span-ness of Furness
Brooks—of course, Furness Brooks had his
own bodyservant. A Filipino. And then the man
on the doorstep was young; she had not con-
sidered that possibility.
It took only a second, all this. She appraised
the young man, and he looked at her. Then he
coughed apologetically.
"I believe—but perhaps I have made a mis-
take. There was an advertisement of a room
for rent, and it gave this number."
5


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Ah," breathed Mrs. Bayne, as if she had
just remembered. "Yes. Of course. Come in,
please."
But she did not show him the room at once.
She led the way into the drawing room, and the
elegance of that apartment plus the tea table
quite overcame him. He had none of Mr.
Brooks's savoir faire, and he had not seen a tea
table in a private house for a long time. Not
since he left home, in fact.
"Please sit down," said Mrs. Bayne
graciously, and sat herself. "You see, we are
three women alone here—do sit down!—and we
really should have a man in the house. A gentle-
man, of course."
"I should try to qualify," said the applicant,
smiling. He had rather a nice smile. "I can only
give my business references. I sell bonds—that
is, when I can sell them."
A sudden recollection broadened his smile.
He had gone back to his class reunion the year
after he came back from the war, and one of
the banners they had carried read: "99 per
cent of us are selling bonds." It had seemed
funny then. Maybe it was not quite so humor-
ous now.
But Mrs. Bayne was looking pained.
"By a gentleman," she said, "I mean birth
6


TWO FLIGHTS UP
and breeding. Those are what count, don't you
think? May I give you a cup of tea?"
The young man glanced at the tea table with
its silver and old china, and it occurred to him
that one of the tests of a gentleman might be
the way he drank his tea! So he took a cup and
managed it successfully. By and large he had
rented a number of furnished rooms, but never
before had the acid test of tea been offered.
It was not until tea had been drunk and Mrs.
Bayne established as a hostess rather than a
landlady that he was allowed to see the room.
He was in a slightly dazed condition as she
rustled up the stairs ahead of him, and so deli-
cate was her manner of showing it that he did
not like to ask the location of the bathroom—
the result being that the evening he came,
searching for it, he walked into Margaret in her
nightgown; her room was across the hall from
his.
For in the end he was accepted, Mrs. Bayne
not thinking to ask him if the room suited him.
Still in the slightly dazed condition he went
down the stairs and out the front door, and it
was only on the pavement that he sufficiently
recovered to mutter that he'd be damned, or
words to that effect.
In such fashion did one Howard Rush War-
7


TWO FLIGHTS UP
rington, late of Elkhart, Indiana, become a part
of the establishment at Ninety-one Kelsey
Street, to become gradually a part of its life.
Names that meant nothing to him then were to
fill his thoughts and alter his life, but he had
never even heard them; Margaret and James
Cox and Mr. Steinfeldt, Furness Brooks and
the McCook woman, Tom Bayne and Holly,
even Phelps, the District Attorney.
Do we exist? Or are we only registered in the
sensorium of the beholder? If this last is true,
none of them existed then at all. But by this act
of his, of walking up the steps at Ninety-one
Kelsey Street, Warrington had called them into
his life.
And they were to do their best to wreck it.
8


CHAPTER TWO
HOLLY BAYNE COULD NOT REMEMBER
when she had not been told that there were
some things no lady did. In the old days at
Grandmother Hollister's it had been rather
awful. Once—only she did not remember this
—the milkman had stopped her nurse on the
street, and little Holly had held out her hand
to him.
"Just as if she knew he brought Her her
milk!" reported the nursemaid fondly.
"And you let her shake hands with the milk-
man?" demanded Grandmother Hollister.
"Well, I'm sure, if he's clean enough to bring
the milk, he's"
"That will do," thundered Grandmother Hol-
lister. And shortly after the girl was dismissed,
although, of course, this may not have been the
reason. Later on she married the milkman, too.
But that is neither here nor there.
When Holly was eight—that was before the
trouble came—they took her out of the danc-
9


TWO FLIGHTS UP
ing class because the Mayor's son had been
admitted to it. Grandma was dead then, and
Aunt Margaret was living with them. And
Aunt Margaret had said it was absurd; the
boy was a nice child. Mrs. Bayne, however, was
adamant.
"Once the bars are down, all sorts of com-
mon people will be let in," she said. "I have
told Mrs. Finch exactly what I think of her."
But those days were rather dreamlike to
Holly now, although they had made their im-
pression on her character. Mostly what she re-
membered was of movement, of people coming
and going and of parcels arriving to be piled
between the fireplace and the wardrobe until
they were opened. Sometimes she was even
allowed to see them opened, and all sorts of
beautiful things would be spread out on her
mother's bed, lace shawls and fans and bright
shiny slippers.
But mostly, after Mademoiselle had gone, she
had stayed with Aunt Margaret. She saw com-
paratively little of her parents. They were
almost always either out, or dressing to go out.
Almost every day Otto, the butler, would press
her father's dinner or dress clothes and carry
them upstairs, and the limousine would come
around at a quarter to eight o'clock. The other
evenings there would be a party at the house;
10


TWO FLIGHTS UP
at six o'clock two or three strange men would
take off their coats in the pantry and begin lay-
ing out china and silver. Aunt Margaret, who
did not always dine downstairs on these nights,
would carry down the long banquet cloth,
bought very probably from Mr. Cox; gilt chairs
would come in the back door from the caterer's;
and as if by magic the dining room would begin
to bloom.
At each place there would be a tiny glass for
sherry, a taller one for sauterne, and, crown-
ing glory of all to Holly's childish eyes, a cham-
pagne glass with a queer hollow stem and a
flat bowl.
"I should think they would spill," she said
once to Aunt Margaret.
"It's a pity they don't," said Aunt Mar-
garet tartly.
She had a diagram in her hand and was
putting down funny little cards at each place,
each with a name on it.
At five minutes to eight Mother would come
down the stairs and Father would follow her,
and then, like the dining table, the staircase
would begin to bloom. Ladies in evening dress
would come up, give their wraps to the house-
maid, all in black with a neat white apron, and
wait for gentlemen who were laying off shiny
ii


T W-O FLIGHTS UP
high hats and overcoats somewhere else. From
the third-floor landing Holly, looking down on
them, had a curious impression of nakedness.
Everything was lost to her from above but their
bare shoulders, backs and bosoms.
On the hall table Otto had carefully laid out
tiny envelopes, each with a tinier card inside
it, and as each gentleman went down he re-
ceived one, looked at the name on the card
and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. It was
the name of the lady he was to "take in."
Up to the top landing would come a strange
medley of odours, perfume and soup and to-
bacco smoke, and through it came Otto's voice,
announcing sonorously, "Mr. and Mrs. Wrig-
ley," "Miss Van Dusen," "Mr. and Mrs. Wil-
loughby-Jones," and so on, and then there
would be a procession of queer, foreshortened
figures past the newel post below toward the
dining room, and it would be all over.
She would crawl back into bed in the third-
floor front room, to which she had been tem-
porarily moved for the party, and the street
lights would make strange shadows on the-
walls. . . .
On the day Warrington was to move in Holly
stood in that same room and remembered those
things. She had, curiously enough, no recollec-
12


T..WO FLIGHTS UP
And she would answer them in French.
"I despise you, and you cannot injure me,"
she would say. It left them uncomfortable and
thwarted.
t She had, as she grew up, no world outside of
the schoolroom and the quiet house where now
her mother and Margaret lived and slowly
"rotted," as Margaret put it. Once a year the
Parker car stopped at the door, and Sally
Parker, Mrs. Bayne's cousin, got out and came
in. Sam, her husband, was making them a small
allowance and had secured them the house.
Occasionally, too, the chauffeur would leave
a box, and after that for a while Mrs. Bayne or
Margaret or Holly, as the case might be, would
blossom out in fresh garments and maybe go
to church.
Mrs. McCook, who kept boarders across the
street, was not blind to these coincidences.
"I haven't seen that before, Clara," she
would say to her maid of all work. "Come
here and look. Did you notice that car here last
week?"
And Clara would answer yes or no, as the
case might be.
It was, as a matter of fact, due to one of
Sally Parker's madeover velvet suits that Holly
had met Furness Brooks again. She had gone


TWO FLIGHTS UP
to be in our house. He'll be a part of us,
whether we like it or not."
"Why? He's not getting his food here. He'll
be in and out, that's all, and mostly out."
Margaret—this was in the drawing room
at tea; they mostly had tea there and then no
supper, or some bread and jam before going to
bed—Margaret had smiled faintly over her
sewing. But Mrs. Bayne had not noticed her;
she seldom did.
The result of all this was that Holly was
puzzled, as she surveyed the room.
She had never seen this young stranger, but
soon he would be there. How did one treat
people like that, who were in one's house but not
of it? She was still uncertain when she went
downstairs to dress for Furness Brooks's after-
noon call, and later on that gentleman found
her detached and unapproachable, and it rather
fanned the ardour of his new flame.
"Seems to me somebody's very quiet to-day,"
he remarked, with an attempt at joviality.
"I feel quiet," she said.
Mrs. Bayne, who was expansively present,
looked at her with a certain irritation. If, as
she frequently told Margaret, Holly was going
to be silly about Furness, she was through.
Simply through. It was the chance of a life-
16


TWO FLIGHTS UP
Hang these decayed gentlewomen, anyhow. As
for that girl
"Probably hates it," he reflected, as he stag-
gered up under his burden. "Hates me, too. Too
good to work; waiting for some man to carry
her away from here and keep her!"
He was still muttering to himself when he
breathlessly reached the top. But the room was
comfortable, large and airy, and if the furni-
ture showed wear it was heavy and well
polished. He put down his bags and moved to
the window.
He had a new sense, after much wandering,
of peace and sanctuary.
"They won't bother me and I won't bother
them," he reflected, of the household.
But, oddly enough, they began to bother him
almost at once. For, after nearly falling down
a dumb-waiter shaft that night while hunting
for a bath, in his pajamas and dressing gown
he stealthily opened Margaret's door by mis-
take. And Margaret was standing by her win-
dow, softly weeping.
He retreated into his own room again and
sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Now what the hell's all that about?" he con-
sidered.
18


CHAPTER THREE
HOLLY HAD GONE INTO THE HALL, AND
from beyond the closed doors came voices and
the sounds of bags. Mrs. Bayne rattled the
china, but it did no good, and when Holly re-
turned she sent her out again.
"Run and bring the toast, will you, dar-
ling?" she said. And to Furness: "Really, this
servant question . . ,."
"It's the same everywhere," he agreed. "The
Barrs—the J. L. Barrs, you know—took a but-
ler and two footmen to Florida, and when the
parlourmaid left, they struck. Absolutely
struck."
Holly had said nothing when she came in,
and now she went out again, still silent. For
a moment he had thought she was going to say
something, and he wondered if Mrs. Bayne had
sent her out so she would not. Drat the woman,
anyhow; she was always hanging around.
But Mrs. Bayne was speaking:
"Have you ever considered—is it one lump
19


TWO FLIGHTS UP
or two? I used always to remember, but now-
adays I so seldom . ,. ..." She sighed. "Have
you ever considered, Furness, how alone we
are here? Just three women, and no man in the
house?"
Mr. Brooks felt a sudden cold dew on his
forehead, and very nearly dropped the teacup.
"It must be lonely," he managed.
"It is worse than that; it is hardly safe. There
have been nights when I have not been able to
sleep."
"You might get a dog." He brightened at
the thought. "I might be able to get you a
dog."
She hardly heard that, so concentrated was
she on her explanation.
"Well, I am happy to say that I have just
changed all that. A very charming man, a
broker, I believe, is to make his home with
us from now on. A—a paying guest."
"Now I call that downright sensible of you,"
said Brooks, greatly relieved. "He's a lucky
chap."
"I'm so very glad you approve," said Mrs.
Bayne.
And then Holly had brought in the toast, to
find Mr. Warrington an accepted fact in the
20


TWO FLIGHTS UP
I
His visits there satisfied his vanity, and he often
had a sort of godlike feeling with the older
women. Out of his largess of news and gossip
he fed them, and he bridged the gulf between
their lost world and themselves.
But shortly after this incident he dropped in
to tea at the Willoughby-Joneses and casually
mentioned the Baynes. He was, so to speak, test-
ing the ice.
"Bayne?" said that important lady. "You
don't mean Tom Bayne's family? Don't tell me
you're going there!"
The ice, he saw, was very thick.
"I drop in once in a while. They're pretty
lonely."
"Well, they should be," Mrs. Willoughby-
Jones had snapped. "If I hadn't happened to
have overdrawn my account just then I'd have
lost a lot. And most people did. Where is the
money? Have they got it?"
"If they have they're not spending it," said
Mr. Brooks. "And the girl's rather nice, you
know."
Mrs. Willoughby-Jones eyed him shrewdly.
"It won't do, Furney," she said. "You've got
your people to consider, and your friends. You
can't raise the dead, and Annie Bayne is socially
dead. Has been for ten years."
22


TWO FLIGHTS UP
She was curious about them, however. There
was a move on, she had heard, to get Tom
Bayne out of the penitentiary. "His kidneys
have gone wrong, or something." She was
opposed to it herself. They had spent a lot, the
Baynes, but she never had believed they had
spent it all. He probably had a good bit tucked
away somewhere.
"How do they live?" she asked. "I know the
Parkers help them, but it isn't much."
"They live like ladies. Of course, the house
is getting shabby, but they keep a servant."
"And three women there! I wonder if Sam
knows that."
He saw it was no good, and for a few days
he stayed away from Holly. He was not ready
to pay the price for her. But it was no use; be-
fore long he was back again.
Those few days, however, were trying ones
at Ninety-one Kelsey Street. Each afternoon
Holly's mother made her dress, and small
cakes from Simmons, the grocer, were brought
in; each afternoon the three ladies foregath-
ered in the drawing room and drank their tea,
and Margaret hemmed her eternal napkins,
holding her work close to her eyes.
At six o'clock or so Mrs. Bayne would sigh
and, having glanced out through the curtains,
23


TWO FLIGHTS UP
was never asked in for tea again. The three
ladies would be sitting there, Mrs. Bayne erect
and Aunt Margaret sewing at her "fancy
work," and the girl would be lying back in a
big chair with her eyes shut.
There would be a genteel little trickle of con-
versation going on, but the girl did not seem to
talk. If one of them saw him she would bow
politely, but that was all. So far as sociability
went he might as well have been cast away on
an island. Better. There would have been no
girl there.
As a matter of fact, he got to worrying about
the girl. She was so lovely and so useless. And
anybody could see with half an eye that they
were just two jumps ahead of poverty, for all
their airs. Why the devil didn't she go out and
get an Honest job of work? She looked as if she
had brains. Or marry the thin fellow who hung
around?
Once indeed he took his courage in his hands
and stopped at the drawing-room door. They
had not heard him come in, and he saw at once
that he had chosen an inopportune moment; the
aunt was walking up and down the floor, look-
ing flushed, and the girl had picked up the sew-
ing and was being useful for once. Mrs. Bayne
was rigid and upright in her chair.
25


TWO FLIGHTS UP
Just as he got to the door the aunt was speak-
ing:
"I've done the best I know how. I've slaved
and worked to my limit. And now when I sug-
gest a perfectly reasonable thing"
He moved away hurriedly, but the conversa-
tion followed him up the stairs.
"I have simply said, not in my house."
"Then where? On a park bench, I suppose!"
"Don't be vulgar, Margaret," said Mrs.
Bayne coldly.
Later on, when peace seemed to be restored,
he went down again with his belated invitation
to the movies, but Mrs. Bayne declined.
"We never go," she said. "Thank you so
much."
He felt a strong inclination to slam the front
door as he went out, but he did not. He had
seen Holly's face, and perhaps for the first time
he had an inkling of what her life might be.


CHAPTER FOUR
*
HE DISAPPROVED OF THEM ALL, BUT
the household began to interest him consider-
ably. After all, a man cannot live in a family
without establishing some sort of tangential
relationship. And not only were they mys-
terious; he fancied they were in trouble. He be-
gan, too, to be conscious that the girl was not
the idler he had thought her.
He never saw a servant about, nor did he
ever see any evidence that any of them laboured,
save Margaret. But before he got downstairs
in the morning the hall and steps had already
been cleaned for the day. Somebody rose very
early, and he thought he knew who it was.
One afternoon he came home to find Brooks's
car at the curb, and laughter and cheerful talk
in the drawing room. The tone of the house
lifted after that, and as he was no fool he con-
nected the two, not without bitterness.
Then, an evening or so later on, he came home
27


E, W O FLIGHTS UP
|
rather late to find Margaret in the vestibule,
looking cold and exceedingly unhappy.
"I've been ringing," she said, "but I sup-
pose they are asleep and don't hear." She re-
membered then that Warrington, like Mr.
Brooks, was supposed to believe in a Hilda,
and added something vague about servants in
general. He admitted her, and she scuttled in
and up the stairs before he saw her face, but
he had an idea that she had been crying.
He began to feel that he was, in a small
way, sitting on a volcano, and about as helpless
as though he had been.
"Hang it all," he reflected as he wound his
watch that night, "if it wasn't for their sicken-
ing pride a man could do something!"
Up to that time his conversation with them
had been strictly of the yea, yea, and nay, nay
order. So far as he had seemed to impress
himself on their lives he might far better have
been a stray dog they had taken in. As a matter
of fact, he was almost exactly that, he reflected.
It was a watchdog they had wanted.
But Holly's problem was becoming fairly
clear to him. If it had not been, a conversation
he overheard through Margaret's transom one
night would have enlightened him. He was in
his big chair by the empty hearth, reading,
28


TWO FLIGHTS UP
when Mrs. Bayne came up and into Margaret's
room.
He had never seen her do that before. His
room was cold, and he had left the door open;
such heat as there was seemed to come up the
staircase well. So he heard some things that set
him to thinking.
At first Mrs. Bayne's voice was low, but it
rose gradually.
"I've had disgrace enough," was the first he
heard. "Any more will kill me."
"That depends on what you call disgrace.
You don't think it's disgraceful to try to marry
Holly to that popinjay. I do."
"I'm warning you. If you do it, I'm through,
Margaret. And Holly's through too. Have you
thought of that? Do you suppose Furness
Brooks would stand for that?" Her voice sof-
tened. "It's her only chance, Margaret."
He closed his door then, feeling as uncom-
fortable as though he had been willfully listen-
ing; and after he had undressed and put out his
lights, he stood by his window thinking things
over. Damn the house, anyhow! All he had
asked of it was peace and a roof, and all he
was getting was the roof. He stood, tall and
broad in his pajamas, and stretched out his arms
to their full muscular length. He was ready to
29


TWO FLIGHTS UP
crush a mountain, and all he had were the
molehills of quarrelsome women.
But he lay awake for a long time, wondering
how Margaret proposed to disgrace the family.
Time went on. He came and went; he began
to nod to Mrs. McCook, sweeping the pavement
across the street; now and then he bought some
apples at Simmons's grocery and carried them
home in a paper bag; and sometimes he walked
to the car with Mr. Williamson, the life-insur-
ance agent in Eighty-seven. He was a part of
the street more than of the house he lived in, at
that time.
If he felt an increasing resentment at the
sight of Furness Brooks's car as he turned the
corner on his way home, he kept it to himself.
There was perhaps less spring in his step those
days as he walked along, but that was all.
He recognized that of the three women in
the house, occupied with their mysterious
troubles, Mrs. Bayne showed the least strain.
Holly seemed thinner, and Margaret was al-
most always in her room now. When he saw
her, she startled him; she was gaunt and hollow-
eyed, and there was a set look of despair on her
face.
One day he was shocked, passing Mrs.
Bayne's door, to hear Holly say:
30


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"But why? Why? You—you aren't omnip-
otent, Mother. You're not—God!"
"Oh, Holly!" Mrs. Bayne wailed. And then a
loose step on the staircase had creaked, and
there was a sort of stricken silence. Margaret's
door had been closed when he reached the top
floor.
He slept badly that night, and at two o'clock
he roused with a start and sat up in bed. There
was a faint odour of escaping gas in his room.
He got up and went out into the hall; it was
stronger there, and suddenly he thought of
Margaret across the hall. Of course it was silly,
but there it was.
He knocked at her door, and receiving no
answer, he opened it. It was dark, and there
was no odour of gas at all, so he quietly closed
it and went downstairs.
As he went, the gas was stronger; it was
quite thick in the lower hall, as if it came
from the kitchen. To save his life he couldn't
find a light switch. He had been in the house
three months, but beyond his first visit, he had
been politely restricted to the hall and the two
flights of stairs to his room, so that he had
to guess his way to the rear. Of course he didn't
dare to strike a match.
He bumped into the dining-room table,
1
31


T, „kW. O PLIGHTS UP
from "Hilda's" rocking chair under her head.
She had put on her one good pair of silk stock-
ings and her beaded slippers, and had evidently
intended to die like a lady. Her left hand was
tightly clenched.
However, she was not dead.
S3


CHAPTER FIVE
MARGARET WAS ILL FOR SOME TIME.
Nobody explained anything to him, but now and
then he met Holly on the stairs with her tray,
and there was a queer, absent look in her eyes.
Once he met her in the lower hall and carried
the heavy tray for her; she followed docilely
enough, and when he gave it to her at the top,
he said:
"That's too heavy for you. Why not let Hilda
carry it?"
But she only said: "Thanks very much." And
added, as if it were forced out of her: "You are
very kind, always."
From the night he had broken his way into
the kitchen and thought it might be Holly, he
had never fooled himself at all. He was in love
with her, ridiculously, sickeningly. He was in
love with her. He did not even approve of her,
except now and then; he thought she was idle
and inbred. He compared her with his mother
and sisters back in Elkhart, Indiana, and he
34


TWO FLIGHTS UP
the street lamp, which made a sort of polished
shield on the shining pavement below it and
left the regions outside of it entirely dark, he
did not at first recognize Margaret.
She had a shawl over her head, and her face
looked white and strained.
"Mr. Warrington," she said, in a half
whisper.
He stopped, of course, and then he knew her.
"You oughtn't to be out here, you know," he
told her. "It's cold to-night."
She said something about only being there for
a minute, and then stepped out onto the paving
and looked up at Mrs. Bayne's windows. They
were lighted, and she seemed relieved.
"I wonder "she began. "I hate so to
bother you, but I can't get out, and there is
something I ought to do. Want to do," she cor-
rected herself. "I was to meet somebody to-
night. A man. A friend." She was breathless.
She put a hand to her flat chest and, as if the
very words were treasonable, looked up at the
windows once more.
"And you're not able to? Is that it?"
"I'm not very strong yet, and besides"
"Where were you to meet him?"
She told him, still in the hushed, breathless
voice.


TWO FLIGHTS UP,
He thought a great deal about the affair as
he ate his dinner. He did not know a great deal
about love, but somehow he had always thought
of it as concerning only the young. Apparently
he had been wrong. It went on and on. One
might have the damnable pain at any age. There
was no immunity. Maybe you fought your way
out of one torture only to meet up with another
later on.
He felt very low in his mind, and even re-
flecting on Furness Brooks's hat no longer com-
forted him.
He found Mr. Cox without any trouble. He
was a commonplace-looking little man, and the
commonplaceness was not decreased by the fact
that that night he wore the cap. As the vessel of
a romantic and clandestine passion he was dis-
appointing, but there was a sort of belligerent
honesty about his face that Warrington ap-
proved of.
"Your name Cox?" he asked.
Mr. Cox wheeled. "Yes. I guess you've got
the advantage of me."
"You don't know me. I have a message for
you. Let's get out of this crowd."
Outside on the pavement Mr. Cox fell into
step beside him. He strode along, stretching
himself to keep up with Warrington's longer
38


TWO FLIGHTS UP
strides, for never, under ordinary circum-
stances, would he allow another man to outstep
him. That was written all over him.
Outside of a jeweller's window down the
street they paused, and Warrington conveyed
his message.
"She's been sick?" said Mr. Cox anxiously.
"Why didn't she send me word before this?"
"I rather gathered that it isn't easy to get
word to you."
"Easy! I'll tell the world it isn't easy. How is
she now?"
"She's better. She says next week will be all
right. Look here, Mr. Cox, why don't you get
her out of there?"
"Get her out? Don't you suppose I would if
I could? Haven't I tried for over a year?"
"Then get her," said Warrington briefly.
Mr. Cox peered up at him, anxiety written
clearly on his face. "Why do you say that?" he
demanded. "Not that it's any of your damned
business, but if you know anything, you'd better
tell me."
His manner was truculent, his voice raised.
Warrington told him. He had all the aver-
age man's objection to interfering in the affairs
of other people, but the picture of Aunt Mar-
garet on the kitchen floor rose in his mind and
39


TWO FLIGHTS UP
coughed, and went out onto the doorstep, to turn
there to Holly.
"Tell your mother I said good-bye."
"I will. And remember, just be happy, Aunt
Margaret."
"I'd be a good bit happier if you"
"Oh, that's all right," said Holly hastily.
"You'd better hurry."
Margaret walked away, and the expressman
drove off. Holly stood on the doorstep with a
queer breathless look on her face; then she
turned and went quietly into the house.
Warrington thought about that a great deal.
The old house was quieter and more depressing
than ever; indeed, for a week or so there was no
tea table laid in the drawing room, and Mrs.
Bayne had her meals in her bedroom. Holly was
carrying trays once more.
"Nothing seriously wrong, I hope?" he asked
her one day, finding her stopped halfway for
breath. He had time to look at the tray. It con-
tained a sizable meal.
"No," she said briefly. "Nothing serious."
She refused his offer of assistance, but it is
rather a pity that he did not look back as he
went on up. She was staring after him, at his
broad shoulders, his air of solid dependability,
with something of the same look with which she
42


TWO FLIGHTS UP
had followed Aunt Margaret that last day. But
he went on.
Later he heard the doorbell, and Furness
Brooks's high, slightly affected voice in the
lower hall. A slightly possessive voice, too, it
seemed to him.
When he went out to his dinner, the drawing-
room door was closed, and there was a low
murmur of voices beyond it.
43


CHAPTER SIX
ONE HAS TO REMEMBER, IN ORDER TO
understand what followed, Howard Warring-
ton's total ignorance of the household. He had
never heard of Tom Bayne, defaulting cashier
of the Harrison Bank. He had no background
whatever for Mrs. Bayne, or Margaret, or for
Holly.
His occasional glimpses into their lives were
those of the individual who, confronted with a
series of peepshows at a fair, looks in each for
a second and then passes on.
There was, for him, no such understanding
as Mrs. Mccook's across the street, a few days
after Mrs. Bayne was up and about again.
"There's a taxicab at Ninety-one, Clara!" she
called. "It must be about time—yes, it is! Mrs.
Bayne's getting into it. That big fellow who's
got the third-floor front is helping her. I haven't
seen that duvetyne before."
No, it meant nothing to him Not the taxicab,
nor Mrs. Bayne's grim set face, nor Molly's


TWO FLIGHTS V Pt
depressed one. Odd to think it, too, considering
how vitally that visit of Mrs. Bayne's to the
penitentiary was to affect him. Odder still to
know that he never noticed the change in her
On her return. He looked in and saw her in her
customary seat in the drawing room, her hat
still on her head, quite alone and gazing at
nothing with singular intensity.
She had never even heard Warrington come
in.
He did not know of the invisible bands that
were closing around Holly, and how Margaret's
desertion and this visit of Mrs. Bayne's were
acting on her. Nor did he overhear, who seemed
always to be overhearing things, the conversa-
tion between Holly and her mother which took
place after he went upstairs.
"Here's your tea, Mother. You mustn't look
like that. I'm sure that he'll get better."
Mrs. Bayne did not turn her head. She merely
moved her eyes until they rested on the girl.
"Better!" she said. "Of course he'll get bet-
ter. They're letting him out."
"When?"
Mrs. Bayne said nothing. She took off her
hat, still with that fixed and dreadful look, and
picked up her cup before she spoke.
"And all my plans for you—gone."
45


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Don't worry about me just now, Mother.
When is he coming?"
"In a month, maybe. I don't know. I don't
care."
Then suddenly Mrs. Bayne broke down. She
sobbed out all her troubles, her thwarted hopes
for Holly, Margaret's marriage, their poverty,
the old disgrace, and now this new trouble. All
of life had let her down, everybody, everything.
She wanted to die. She couldn't go on any
longer.
It was not new to Holly. She had heard it all
before. But now there was a difference; there
was an underlying current of reproach for her.
She could help if she would; at least she could
save herself out of the wreckage. She knew
well enough that such salvage was to save her
mother as well, to reinstate her, but she shut
her mind to that.
By the time Mrs. Bayne ceased and wiped
her eyes, she had made up her mind. After all,
what did it matter? What were dreams against
this stark reality?
"If you think marrying Furness would help,"
she said slowly, "I will do it." She hesitated. "It
doesn't seem entirely fair to him, but if he
understands that I don't care very much, one
way or the other"
46


TWO FLIGHTS UP
Holly, in a new frock, was listlessly sitting
near by, but there was nothing listless about
Mrs. Bayne.
"Personally," she was saying, "I prefer a
church. I was married in St. Andrews, and it
would be only right for Holly. Holly darling,
you run out and bring in the toast. Hilda is so
frightfully slow."
Mrs. Willoughby-Jones was not listening,
however. She was gazing at the large young
man absorbedly picking up his mail in the hall.
She watched him drop a letter, ignore it, and
dazedly gather up his evening papers and dis-
appear. But she had seen his face in the mirror,
and he had certainly looked very odd.
She wanted to ask Mrs. Bayne who he was,
but to Mrs. Bayne there had been no young
man in the hall. So far as Mrs. Willoughby-
Jones was concerned, it was clearly Mrs.
Bayne's attitude that the front door had not
closed and that nobody had passed by.
But he had passed by. What is more, he knew
his way about now, and he did not go up the
stairs. He went straight back to the kitchen,
closing the door carefully, and faced Holly, who
was making toast with a sort of grim expert-
ness in an otherwise empty kitchen.
She looked up at him and went a little pale.
48


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Mother. First Father did, and then Aunt
Margaret. It's killing her."
"What's Aunt Margaret done?"
"She's married a clerk in the store where
she—a clerk in a store."
He stared at her incredulously.
"Oh!" he said at last. "Oh, that's what she's
done! My God, and you call that letting her
down! Why, your Aunt Margaret's got more
guts in a minute than you'll have all your life.
Wake up, girl. You're living in a real world,
not a world of ladies and gentlemen." His voice
rose; his collar felt too tight for him. He ran a
finger inside it.
"Marry your popinjay!" he said. "Go on
mincing through life. Drink your tea and hold
your little finger out! I'm through."
Suddenly he saw the engagement ring on her
left hand, and he lifted it and looked at it. From
the ring he looked at her hand; it was small and
shapely, but it bore the scars of "Hilda's" work,
of much living service. Involuntarily she tried
to close it, like Margaret, and the sight made
him wince.
"You poor little fool," he said gently, and
kissed it.
So


CHAPTER SEVEN
$
AFTER THAT WARRINGTON DID NOT
see her very much. When he did, he fancied
that she was thinner; there were hollows in her
cheeks he had not seen before. And once down-
town he saw her on a street corner, talking to
Margaret, who was looking younger by years
and with her left hand no longer clenched. It
gave him an actual pain at the heart to see that
Margaret was growing younger and Holly
older.
They did not see him, and he passed by.
But if Holly was looking worn and wretched,
Mrs. Bayne was expanding daily. Cars came
and people called. Old friends, who had appar-
ently forgotten her, drove up in limousines and
drank her tea and munched Holly's toast. And
when they were about to go, she would touch
the bell and summon Hilda to let them out.
As Hilda never came, they would let them-
5i


TWO FLIGHTS UP
selves out, but the proper gesture had been
made. Inefficient servants they could under-
stand; no servants they could not.
But no young people came. The rallying was
of the older generation. The young ones did not
know Holly.
And Holly was puzzled about her mother.
There was a strange excitement about her quite
foreign to her. From the day of the engagement
she had been like some one who carries, warm
and safe, a wonderful secret. She would sit and
plan, not talking much, but with a half smile on
her lips. Out of these pleasant reveries she
would rouse, to speak of the wedding. Always
it was the wedding.
"You really should have bridesmaids," she
would say.
"I don't know any girls, Mother."
"Furness could get them. He is extremely
popular."
Or it would be the trousseau and the wedding
gown.
"I have that old point lace," she would say.
"It's in a trunk in the attic. And your Aunt
Margaret is really clever with her needle. Per-
haps I'd better go to see her. After all, nobody
knows about her. I do wish you would take
some interest, Holly."
52


TWO FLIGHTS UP
It was during one of those talks that Holly
looked up with a curiously direct glance.
"How are we going to do any of these things,
Mother, without any money?"
And again Mrs. Bayne smiled her faint con-
tented smile.
"My dear child," she said, "I have a little.
.You can leave that to me."
"You're not borrowing it?"
"Certainly not! I have a little laid away,"
said Mrs. Bayne evasively. "For heaven's sake,
Holly, don't look at me like that! It isn't very
much. But it will start you like a lady, if we are
careful."
Holly gave her mother a long careful glance,
but Mrs. Bayne was pouring herself a second
cup of tea. She was of an old school, and so as
she drank it, she held her little finger out and
delicately curved. A slight colour came into the
girl's face as she noticed it.
They had set the wedding for two months
ahead. Warrington knew that from the news-
papers, for they did not tell him. In a way he
had lost ground recently rather than gained it;
he had never again been so close to them as just
after Margaret's attempt at suicide.
If he laid Holly's aloofness to resentment,
nobody could blame him. If there was a fear of
53


TWO FLIGHTS U E
her own weakness in quiet dignity toward him,
who was to tell him that? How could he know
that since that day in the kitchen he had occu-
pied most of her thoughts? Poor Holly, wearing
her engagement ring and his kiss on the same
hand!
There were a good many times when he de-
cided to pack up and clear out, and as many
others when he decided to stay and see it
through. He would sit in his chair or walk about
the room, arguing pro and con, and sometimes
he would simply sit and brood.
Once or twice, sitting thus, he heard stealthy
footsteps in the attic overhead. The first time
he heard them he got up and went out into the
hall, only to meet Mrs. Bayne there with some
old lace over her arm and a candle in her hand.
She had showed it to him with pride.
"It was on my wedding gown," she said, "and
now it is for Holly. It is really lovely."
After that the sounds in the attic were like
bugle calls to battle for his bitter thoughts.
On one such evening, however, following the
sounds Warrington heard a light knock on his
door. Mrs. Bayne was outside, and as he opened
the door she held her finger to her lips. She
slipped into the room and closed the door.
"I am so sorry to trouble you," she said
54


TWO FLIGHTS UP
cautiously, "but I wonder if you will do me a
favour?"
"Anything I can," he said politely, and eyed
Her. He did not see her, really; all he saw was a
ruthlessly genteel person who was not to be let
down at any cost. But he did see her hands.
They were soft and white and unsullied by any
labour.
"I so seldom go out," she said, in a breathless
sort of voice. "I dare say I should. I often think
I will go for a walk, but somehow I don't. And
I have a bond here. Rather a large one, and I
should have it sold. I know so little about busi-
ness, but I—it is for a thousand dollars."
She opened it out. He saw that her hands
were shaking, but he laid it to the stairs.
"I have not told my daughter that I am
selling it," she went on. "She might worry. But
just now, with so many fresh expenses! And
you sell bonds, don't you?"
"When I get the chance," he said, gravely
smiling down at her. "If you care to trust this
to me I'll see what I can do. Of course," he
added, to put her more at ease, "I may vanish
with it! One never knows."
She hastened to reassure him, her childish
blue eyes turned up to his, her relaxed white
throat quivering. She was oddly emotional; he
55


TWO FLIGHTS UP
had never thought of her as emotional. For the
first time he understood why Holly felt she
could not let her down; why, she was like a
child; her airs and poses were those of a little
girl playing at being a lady. In spite of himself
his heart warmed toward her.
"If it just isn't too much trouble," she said.
"And, of course, any commission"
"It's absolutely no trouble," he told her, "and
there's no question of any commission between
friends."
He gave her again his grave smile, and she
went out.
It was only when she had gone, stealing down
the stairs as carefully as she had come up, that
he stood for some time looking at the bond in
his hand. It was almost farcical, his having it.
And to-morrow he would bring it back in neat
tens and twenties, and it would go to buy the
clothes and the little intimate things with which
Holly would go to her husband.
56


CHAPTER EIGHT
WARRINGTON SOLD THE BOND NEXT
day and brought the money back. It was a cou-
pon bond, and it went out with an odd lot from
the office. Save for a sense of responsibility as
to the safe carriage of the currency in his
pocket—Mrs. Bayne had asked for currency—
the transaction was ended, so far as he was
concerned.
He took the money back that night, buttoned
inside his coat against pickpockets, and he
walked part of the way. He had found that
walking until he was dog tired was the only
way he could sleep, just then.
Furness Brooks's car was at the curb as
usual, and so Warrington passed the open draw-
ing-room door without a glance. He had a dread
of seeing Holly and her lover together, of hav-
ing their new intimacy thrust at him by some
glance or gesture. But as a matter of fact, there
was hardly a chance of that. It was, by and
large, a strange wooing. . . .
57


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Come over and sit by me, Holly, won't
you?"
"I can talk better here."
If Furness insisted, she would go reluctantly,
and the hand he held was often cold as ice. But
she was gentleness and acquiescence itself to
him, as if she would make up in this way for
her failure in the other.
Fortunately Furness liked to talk. He was
already planning for the wedding, seeing in it
that one moment when he would hold the centre
of the stage and not be "filling in." He and
Holly. He was determined that the wedding
should be correct in every detail.
"It's a pity Sam Parker's thinking of going
abroad. He's the logical person to give you
away."
There were times, of course, when his pas-
sion got the better of his common sense, when
his wooing became instead a sort of fierce ges-
ture of possession. Once, carried away by it,
he went too far with her, and she struck him
with her closed fist and slammed out of the
room. But he knew he had been wrong, and he
left her no loophole of escape. He apologized
by note that night and flowers the next morn-
ing, and she had to come back to him, a trifle
wary, perhaps, but still Bis. . . .
58


TWO FLIGHTS UP.
Warrington, of course, had no idea of this.
He was still seeing the household through an
occasional peephole: tramping up the stairs past
Mrs. Bayne's room, where, if her door was
open, he could see her busy now with endless
memoranda, past Holly's little chamber, with its
tidy virginal white bed and its blue curtains—
he always tried very hard not to glance into that
room—and so on to his own lonely quarters,
where a pair of military brushes on the dresser
and the books on a table were all that marked
it his.
So that night he went up the stairs, and Mrs.
Bayne, hearing the creak of the loose step out-
side, followed him up.
He gave her the money. He had an idea that
it was more money than she had held in her
hands for many years, but she was as calm as
a May morning.
"By the way," he said, "I hope you don't keep
things like that lying around the house. They're
negotiable, you know."
"Just what do you mean?"
"Bonds like that are much the same as cur-
rency. They can be stolen and sold."
Afterward he was to remember that she made
an odd little startled gesture, but she said noth-
ing for a moment. Then:
59


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"I see," she said quietly. "Thank you for tell-
ing me." She moved to the door and paused
there irresolutely.
"I'll be very careful," she said, and added
irrelevantly, her eyes on the package of cur-
rency in her hand: "There are certain sacrifices
one must make at times like this. I dare say you
know that my daughter is to be married?"
"I saw it in the paper. Yes."
"She is marrying very well," she said, still
in that curious irresolute manner. "Very well
indeed."
Suddenly all his resentment and anger flared
up in him. He could hardly control his voice.
"That depends, of course, on how you look at
it."
"I don't understand you."
"If she cares for the man and not for what
he will bring her."
Their eyes met, and there was certainly no
friendliness in them. Mrs. Bayne drew herself
up.
"That, of course, is not a matter for discus-
sion," she said quietly, and went out of the
room.
That she bore him no lasting grudge, how-
ever, he saw the next evening. He found her
when he came home, drinking her tea as usual,
60


TWO FLIGHTS UP
with her hat awry on her head and a litter of
parcels and boxes in the hall. She was clearly
excited, and more expansive than he had ever
seen her.
"Do come in," she said. "Holly, a cup for Mr.
Warrington. Don't bother to ring. By the way,
darling, I stopped in at your Aunt Margaret's.
She'll be delighted to do what I suggested."
But Holly was already out of the room.
Mrs. Bayne waved a hand toward the hall.
"What a day I've had! But the prices of things
since the war! I have done so little buying that
I didn't realize."
Her eyes glittered; her hands trembled. There
was almost ecstasy in her voice. He saw that
she had not so much forgiven the evening be-
fore as forgotten it, and to the unaccustomed
luxury of being with Holly he surrendered for a
moment his own anger and bitterness.
He even had a few moments alone with her,
while Mrs. Bayne went upstairs to take off her
hat, a few moments which led to a rather
curious result.
"I've always wanted to tell you," he said in a
low voice. "I don't know what got into me the
other day. I hadn't a right in the world to say
what I did."
"No," she said. "Of course, you didn't really
61


TWO FLIGH TS UP
thing that she shouldn't have sold? Oh, don't
you see, if she has, she's done it for me, and I
just can't bear it."
"I'm quite sure you are wrong. I'll tell you,
since it's worrying you. She gave me a bond
to sell. I got her a good price. And that's all."
"A bond!" she said. "She gave you a bond?
My poor mother!"
Her face was stricken; she seemed to be hold-
ing to the tea table for support. And then Mrs.
Bayne came back.
»3


CHAPTER NINE
EVEN THEN WARRINGTON HAD NO IDEA
of the gravity of the situation. He helped them
carry Mrs. Bayne's parcels up to her bedroom,
and later on he could hear her opening them and
talking, still in her new excited voice. She was
still gloating happily as he went out again to
his dinner, where the cashier at the Red Rose
told him he looked glum, and hinted that the
movies would cheer them both up a bit.
"There's a good show at the Grand," she said.
"A laugh a minute."
"I wouldn't dare," he told her, smiling down
at her. "I've got a cracked lip."
He ate his dinner morosely and thoughtfully,
and then went back to the house. So Mrs. Bayne
had had no business to sell the bond! And in
doing so she had added to Holly's worries, as
if she had not enough already.
Worries! The word was too weak. Sacrifices
was a better one; that was what she was doing,
sacrificing herself, selling herself; and for
64


TWO FLIGHTS UP
what? To restore a little elderly gentlewoman
to a world she had somehow lost! A silly world,
full of vain imaginings and false values.
He succeeded finally in working himself to a
very fair passion, so that sleep later on was out
of the question. He got up, and in his dressing
gown and slippers sat in the chair by the hearth,
a cigarette in his hand—and was wakened not
long after by the odour of burning carpet.
He looked remorsefully at the charred spot
on the floor, rubbed it with his fingers but failed
to erase it, and was about to try bed once more
when he heard a faint sound overhead.
He stepped out into the upper hall and lis-
tened. There was a door to the attic staircase,
a door which was always religiously kept closed.
But now it was open, and a thin light trickled
down, outlining the doorway in the surrounding
darkness. A recollection of another night when
he had stood there came to him, a night when
Margaret had given up the battle between
family pride and happiness, and had laid herself
down to rest on the cold linoleum in the kitchen.
It made his heart faint within him. There had
been a sort of quiet despair in Holly's face
that afternoon, as if at last she too had reached
the end of the road.
He ran up the stairs and into the attic room.
65


T. W O FLIGHTS UP
There was a candle on the floor, and Holly
was sitting beside it. She had drawn out an old
trunk and lifted pieces of two of the ancient
floor boards, which had been beneath it, and
over them she was staring at him with the
strangest look he had ever seen on her face.
"Please go back," she said. "I'm quite all
right."
"You don't look all right," he told her
roughly. "And this place is cold. Do you want
pneumonia?"
"I've asked you to go. If you don't, I'll have
to, and I've got to stay."
"Don't be silly. If you're in some sort of
trouble"
"I'm in trouble enough, without you to make
it worse. Please go. I've got to work this out
alone."
"But if I only want to help? I give you my
word of honour, that's all."
She sat looking up at him for a perceptible
time before she made a despairing gesture of
acquiescence.
"You'll find out anyhow," she said. "Look
here."
But when he looked, he was in no way the
wiser. He had, as has been said before, no
background for Holly or the family, and he
66


TWO FLIGHTS UP
had never heard of Tom Bayne. All he saw was
that beneath the lifted floor boards a small
suitcase was lying.
"I see. What about it?"
"The bond," she said. "It must have come
from here. She had no bonds. It was when she
came up to get the point lace. She must have
moved the trunk."
He was still struggling to understand.
"You mean it didn't belong to her?"
"It belonged to the Harrison Bank," she said,
and sat still, waiting for the heavens to fall.
When presently she realized that nothing fell
but a silence, she looked up at him again.
"From the bank, don't you understand?"
But he still looked blank.
He had never heard of their trouble! It
seemed incredible to her, who had thought all
the world knew of it. But the mere telling of
the facts seemed to ease her. And when he had
finally gathered the essential facts, a difficult
matter because she whispered them, as if to do
so somehow minimized their import, he was
more at a loss than he had ever been in his self-
confident still young life. He saw that she was
laying her burden on him with childlike faith,
as if by sheer virtue of being a man he would
know what to do.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
He did the only thing he could think of. He
picked up the candle and held out his hand.
"What are you going to do?"
"Get out of here, for one thing."
"And leave that?"
"Why not? It's been here for years."
"But suppose she comes up again? Suppose
she"
"She's not likely to, before morning, is she?
And she'll have to know sooner or later that it's
been found."
"It isn't that." She swallowed, as if to mois-
ten her dry throat. "She's taken one bond al-
ready, and you see—she needs it so dreadfully."
It was at that moment that he felt a cold
chill travel slowly up his spine and settle in his
brain. The part he himself had already played
in the situation began to dawn on him. He had
sold a stolen bond, one of the carefully listed
missing securities of a looted bank! Sooner or
later
He pulled himself together and smiled down
at her gravely.
"What's your own idea?" he asked.
"They have to go back to the bank, of course.
Only, Mother's got to be kept out of it. There
must be some way."
"Of course there's a way," he told her.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
But he was not so sure of it. One of the bonds
had already been sold. It might escape identi-
fication indefinitely; on the other hand, it might
already have been recognized, his residence in
the Bayne house noted, and a fatal connection
established. In that case
"See here," he said. "Suppose I take the suit-
case down to my room overnight? Then in the
morning I can see the bank people and arrange
for everything to be done quietly."
"Without dragging Mother in?"
"I've promised to keep her out, haven't I?"
She swayed a little as he helped her up. Still
holding the candle, he lifted the suitcase; dust
had penetrated the old floor boards and covered
it, and he shook that off. Then he replaced the
boards and took a last look around him.
"Better go ahead," he told her. "I'll follow
after you're safely down."
But she stood still, looking up at him.
"Why should you help us ?" she said. "We are
nothing to you."
"You are everything in the world to me,"
he said quietly, and watched her down the stairs.
69


CHAPTER TEN
MARGARET COX WAS VERY HAPPY. SHE
had even gained in flesh; every now and then
James, her husband, put a penny in the slot of
some weighing machine and stood by, eying
the result proudly.
"A woman's the better for a little meat on
her bones," he would tell her. "It shows some-
body's looking after her."
And she no longer clenched her left hand for
fear somebody would see her scarred forefinger.
"Open it out," said lordly James. "It's only lazy
hands that people have a right to be ashamed
of. Only "and here his voice would soften
—"only, I wish the blisters were on mine and
not on yours, my girl."
He always called her his girl, and in his eyes
Margaret really was a girl; he had never quite
got over his astonishment at the depths of her
ignorance in some matters.
"Well, I'm darned," he would say. "Didn't
they ever tell you anything at all?"
70


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"They" in his mind were Margaret's family,
and less immediately that terra incognita of
aristocracy and repressions from which he had
abducted her. "Certainly put one over on them,"
was his manner of referring to that abduction.
"There were a good many things we were
taught not to discuss," she would say, colouring
faintly. "It wasn't considered ladylike."
"Well, you can't be a real honest-to-John
woman and be their kind of a lady at the same
time," he would retort, and chuckle a bit.
Undoubtedly he was a vulgar little man, but
he was honest, good-humoured, and sturdily
independent. "I stand on my own feet," was
one of his commonest expressions. Oddly
enough, Margaret not only did not resent his
vulgarity; she seemed indeed rather to like it.
It was perhaps her idea of a gesture toward
truth after a lifetime of polite evasions.
And probably it was. James's honesty was
his outstanding quality; he had a tremendous
pride in it.
"You can tell them," he had said during the
strange days of their courtship, "that I'm no
great shakes as to money or position, but you
can tell 'em too for me that, by God, I'm honest.
And that's more than they can say."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
Which was, by the way, the only reference
he had ever made to Margaret concerning the
presence of her brother-in-law in the peni-
tentiary.
They lived very simply. They had three
rooms, a bath, and a kitchenette, and Margaret
never got over the sensation of extravagance
when she let the tub fill with hot water; taking
a bath "at home," as she still called the Bayne
house, had required deliberation and prepara-
tion. The furniture had come from "the store,"
at a discount, and in the evenings, after her
bath, Margaret would put on a bright pink
kimono and sit in front of her shiny dressing
table and brush the long heavy hair which was
her only beauty.
James would be reading the paper in the living
room, and the odour of his cigar would come in
through the doorway. It still seemed to her in-
credible that a man—her man—was in the next
room, with the door open between.
Sometimes he would call in. He had taken to
reading the society columns.
"I see your cousins the Sam Parkers are
going abroad."
"Really? They're leaving the children with
the governess, I dare say."
Or:
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Mrs. Willoughby-Jones is giving a luncheon,
Margaret. Ask you?"
"No. Why on earth should she?"
"Well, why shouldn't she?" he would grum-
ble. "I guess you're as good as anybody she'll
have there."
And Margaret would smile at his belligerent
tone.
On the day Holly's engagement was an-
nounced in the papers, James took one with him
to the store and showed it around proudly.
"Seen this, Smith?" he would say. "My wife's
niece. She's marrying young Brooks; father
was Schuyler Brooks, you know."
To which the department responded in kind.
Smith, or Jones, would call James and show him
a tablecloth.
"See this tablecloth, Cox?" he would say.
"Just sold it to young Mrs. Maginnis; mother
was a Flaherty, you know."
And James took his ragging cheerfully.
He adored Margaret. Beyond his wife, his
Home, and his department in the store he had
no life and wished none. He liked his world to
be within the reach of his arms.
It was to this humble terrain, then, that the
battle of the Bayne pride was to shift, and that
right speedily. They had come in from the
73


TWO FLIGHTS UP
movies, and Margaret was in front of her toilet
table. She looked up, and James was in the door-
way with the newspaper in his hand.
"See here," he said, "did you know that there
was a move on to get Tom Bayne out of the
penr
"My goodness, no!"
"Well, there is. Or was."
"They're not going to let him out?"
"The pardon's granted. Kidneys gone wrong
or something. Say he's a dying man."
"Oh, James!" she wailed. "What will they
do? And Holly's wedding next month!"
"I thought you didn't want that wedding."
"Well, they want it. At least"
"At least the old lady does, eh? Well, that's
neither here nor there. I just want to say this,
Margaret: He's not to come here bothering you,
or me either. I'm not trafficking with crooks."
She did not resent it. She knew his frightful
honesty, and she liked his masterfulness.
"I don't think he'll bother us, James. But
what they're to live on I don't know."
"Let him get out and work. Dig ditches or
run a street car. That may hurt his pride, but
it's honest."
"If he's sick"
"Oh, fiddledeedee!" he grunted. "Sick, noth-
74


•J W O FLIGHTS UP
ing. That's the old dodge to get him out. Every-
thing goes but flat feet."
But later on he felt that perhaps he had been
a trifle violent, and after they were in bed he
put a hand over and caught hers. He felt care-
fully for her worn forefinger and stroked it
gently.
"Maybe I said too much," he whispered, "but
he left you to slave for them there. I hate his
very insides."
He went to sleep soon after, but Margaret
lay awake, wide-eyed and anxious. The satin
had come for Holly's wedding dress, and al-
ready she had cut it out. It was very wonderful
satin, but she wondered now if it would ever be
used. If only she hadn't cut it!
She was not the only one who lay awake.
Indeed, save Mrs. Bayne and James, none of
the characters in the approaching drama got
much sleep at all.
Holly's world had suddenly crashed beneath
her feet, and the very figure of stability, her
mother, had destroyed it. Holly might have been
whirling through space, with her father and her
mother and Furness, and the children at school
who used to howl after her, all whirling about
her. When she dropped to sleep, it was to have
the sensation of falling, and to waken damp
75


TWO FLIGHTS UP
with the sweat of terror. Once she roused thus
and sat up in bed to see two shining eyes fixed
on her from across the room.
It was some time before she realized that they
were the paste buckles on a pair of slippers on
her dressing table, a part of her mother's
purchases that day.
Through it all, however, there was one figure
that did not move or whirl. It was as steady as
one of the fixed stars. When her tired brain
refused the hundred crowding chaotic thoughts,
it seized on this for rest and peace: Warrington,
solid and gravely dependable, and saying: "You
are everything in the world to me."
Toward morning she fell into heavy sleep,
from which she was roused by the ringing of
the doorbell. Her mother was stirring across
the hall, and Holly opened her door and spoke
to her.
"I'll go down," she said. "Go back to bed,
Mother."
"Don't let anyone in until you know who it
is," said Mrs. Bayne. There was a curious catch
in her voice, and even in the haste of getting
down and opening the front door, Holly noticed
it.
As if it had been lying in the back of her
mind all the time the thought sprang out at her:
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Suppose there was something more in selling
that bond than just taking what didn't belong
to one? Suppose there was—risk?"
"Who's there?" she called with her hand on
the knob. "What do you want?"
"Telegram," was the laconic answer.
She opened the door, and, after signing the
book, read the message. She knew, as she stood
there, that her mother was in the hall above,
listening and perhaps trembling.
"It's just a telegram, Mother," she called up
reassuringly.
"A telegram? What about?"
"The pardon's been granted. He'll be coming
home, Mother, as soon as he can travel."
Suddenly and without warning Mrs. Bayne
burst into tears.
77


CHAPTER ELEVEN
WARRINGTON HAD CARRIED DOWN THE
suitcase and placed it in his closet. He felt no
desire to examine its contents. Rather, he had
an extreme repugnance to so doing. It occurred
to him, grimly enough, that if the bond he had
sold had been identified, the last place he should
choose for the suitcase was his closet.
Outside of that, and his yearning pity for
Holly, his attention was mainly directed to Mrs.
Bayne and her temptation. Had Holly been
right, and had she discovered the hiding place
by accident? Or had she known it all along?
Stranger things than that had happened, he
knew; but the idea of Mrs. Bayne as particeps
criminis was hardly tenable.
No. He preferred Holly's theory. It was
more like her. He could even see her moving
the trunk into a better light, and perhaps a
board lifting, a giving under her feet. Then the
discovery, and the temptation; sitting there,
perhaps, on the trunk itself, staring at the
78


TWO FLIGHTS UP
pose the bond had been recognized and traced
to him? Wasn't there a charge of receiving
stolen goods? But even without that, suppose
he met Mrs. Bayne on the stairs. What would
he do, or say? Or she?
After he was dressed he got out the suitcase
and laid it on his bed. It had some old foreign
labels on it, and he regarded them with mixed
feelings.
"So you've travelled, have you?" he reflected.
"But of course you would. That was a part of
the game, the whole damned snobbish game."
He wandered to the window and looked down
into the quiet street. And a large but lightly
stepping gentleman who had been eying the
house from the opposite pavement leisurely
lighted a cigarette and moved on. Warrington
did not notice him.
Still at a loss, he left the suitcase and went
down the stairs, to find Holly patiently waiting
for him in the lower hall. The strong morning
light streamed in through the glass of the front
door and brought out painfully her thinness and
the tired lines about her eyes.
"I couldn't go up to your room," she said.
"She's awake, and not very well."
"You still want me to get it out of the
house?"
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Yes. That's all I can think of. You see, my
father is coming back. He's been ill, and so
they're letting him out. Or maybe he hasn't
been ill; maybe he's just pretending. I don't
know." She smiled up at him painfully. "You
see what it's done to me. I don't believe much
in anything just now."
"You can believe in me," he said sturdily.
"You have to have one anchor, and I'm it."
"I do believe in you."
But she did not look up.
Her idea was that he take the suitcase to
Margaret's and leave it there until he had seen
the bank officials.
"You can't do anything else with it," she
said. "I've thought and thought. You see, the
lock's broken, and anybody might open it."
"All right," he consented. "I'll put some'
heavy twine around it, and then you can give me
the address and the thing's done. And now
you're to stop worrying! It's all fixed and
everybody's happy. I'll get a taxi and clear
out."
"If she heard a taxi, she'd get up and look
out. She might think it was—Father."
"All right," he agreed, indomitably cheerful
for her benefit. "Then I won't get a taxi! Much
as I dislike the plebeian street car . . ."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
As he went up the stairs, he confronted Mrs.!
Bayne.
"I thought I heard voices," she said plain-
tively. "Is Holly down there ?—I want my tray,
Holly."
"Yes, Mother."
He had to wait above until Mrs. Bayne had
retired and closed her door. Then he went down,
suitcase in hand. The Coxes' address was on a
slip of paper on the table, and he took it and
went out.
Had he been less absorbed in his errand, he
would have noticed that the large but lightly
stepping gentleman followed him onto the
car.
Margaret was at home. Before he rang the
bell of the little apartment he could hear her
singing inside. Coming down, he had not given
much thought to Margaret save as to what he
should tell her, but the singing gave him a sur-
prise. He had never heard her sing before. He
had somehow never thought of her as sing-
ing.
He had an instant picture of her on that
kitchen floor months ago, of her silk stockings
and beaded slippers, of the neatness of the
organdie collar around her almost pulseless
neck. And now she was singing.
8a


TWO FLIGHTS UP;
Life was queer. It was darned queer.
She opened the door herself, a strange Mar-
garet, lighted with happiness like a torch; a
fulfilled Margaret, calm and unashamed.
"Why, upon my word!" she said. "Come in.
I was just sweeping."
He went in and deposited his suitcase on the
floor, while Margaret eyed it curiously.
"I'm playing errand boy this morning," he
told her. "I'm to leave this here, and Holly will
be in later to explain."
Neither he nor Margaret noticed this use of
Holly's given name.
"Is it the lace? If that's all lace"
"Oh!" he said, grinning cheerfully at her. "I
forgot one thing. You're not to open it. You are
to promise. Cross your heart you'll put it in a
closet and leave it there until further instruc-
tions."
Margaret smiled in return.
"But what is it?"
"I'll tell you," he said, lowering his voice.
"It's a bomb, a clockwork bomb. Since you
married Mr. Cox, I have been consumed by a
burning jealousy, and now I propose to do away
with Mr. Cox."
She laughed outright then, and her laughter
was as strange and surprising as her singing.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
- 'Then I shall put it in his closet," she said.
"And it will destroy his rows and rows of shoes.
That will be your revenge, for he is frightfully
yain about his feet. Of course, he has to be on
them all day, and to change his shoes rests
him."
She took him around to see the flat, leading
him first into the bedroom, where she placed the
suitcase in James's closet and showed him the
tidy line-up of shoes. And after the shoes she
showed him the further extravagances of
James's neckties.
"Look!" she said. "Did you ever see so many
ties?"
"Looks like the wealth of Ormus and of Ind
to me."
But after he had seen it all, the imitation
ivory toilet set which had been a recent gift, the
shining kitchen, and had even opened a tap to
show how hot the water ran, she turned to him
with a different note in her voice—as if the
Margaret who had married James Cox had re-
tired, and the Margaret of the old house was
back again.
"Do you know they are letting Tom Bayne
out?"
"I learned it this morning."
"But it's dreadful. What will they do? And
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TWO FLIGHTS U P
what will Furness Brooks think about it?"
A hot wave of anger flushed him.
"What the deuce would he think? He's known
about it all along, hasn't he?"
"I know. But people had forgotten it, and
now it's all brought up again. And a church
wedding! Her father can't give her away."
He controlled his voice with an effort.
"If he thinks about that at all, then he doesn't
deserve her. And if he doesn't deserve her, I
hope to God he doesn't get her."
His sudden anger surprised him. He had
thought he had schooled himself better, and
Margaret's eyes were wide.
"What I mean is," he said more quietly, "you
and I can't help that, can we? We'll have to let
it work itself out."
Just inside the entrance door stood Mar-
garet's work basket, and a piece of heavy ivory-
white satin lay on the top of it. As he was taking
his leave, his eyes fell on it, and when he stopped
outside at the elevator to light a cigarette, his
hands were shaking.
"I'm in fine shape," he told himself grimly.
"Shot to pieces, by heck! I'll have to stop smok-
• 99
ing.
And comforted by that masculine panacea
for all ills, went down and out into the street.
8s


TWO FLIGHTS UP
As with most such resolutions, however, he
forgot it almost at once, and a short time after
lighted another cigarette for the mere pleasure
of observing that his hands were all right again!
By the time he reached the bank he had man-
aged to concentrate on his business there. But
the concentration did him very little good. That
distinguished citizen and president of the re-
organized Harrison Bank, Mr. Samuel Parker,
had just sailed for Europe. This from the door
man. And inside the bank an absent-looking
youth raised his eyes from figures of incredible
size to tell him that the vice president was down
with influenza.
"What's the cashier's name?" he asked,
irritably resorting to somewhat smaller fry.
"Gilbert. He's on jury duty just now."
"Then who the hell's running this bank?" he
demanded. But the absent youth went back to
his figures, and Warrington retreated to the
street, uneasy and at a loss. How about going
to the district attorney? But that meant the
law, and probably publicity; he had a cynical
belief that district attorneys thrived on publicity.
No, that wouldn't do. He'd have to wait till he
could manage to think things out.
It was in this frame of mind that he bumped
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
into a passer-by and angrily told him to look
out what he was doing. And the passer-by
snapped back: "Look out yourself, you darned
fool!"
It was Furness Brooks.


CHAPTER TWELVE
FURNESS HAD BEEN IN A STATE OF
rage since the announcement in the papers the
evening before of Bayne's approaching release.
By direct appeal he had managed to engineer
a few callers to the Bayne house, but as time
went on, it became more and more clear to him
that he could not force them back into society.
And for all his lack-lustre eyes, he was shrewd
enough. He knew that his present semi-popu-
larity was due largely to the demand for unat-
tached men at dinners, and the bits of gossip he
could carry from one tea table to another.
With the failure of his campaign, therefore,
it was plain to him that his popularity would
cease with his marriage. Some men held on, he
knew, but that was because they had married
girls who could hold up their own end in the
frivolous give and take of smart groups. With
the same clear view he took of himself, he knew
that Holly would never do that.
"Why don't you smoke?" he asked her once.
"Everybody does, you know."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"I have tried. I hate it."
He brought her a long shell cigarette holder
one day, and as dutifully as she did everything
those days, she tried it.
"You hold it like a fountain pen, honey!"
"Well, how on earth should one hold the
thing?" she demanded. And then, sorry for her
tone: "You can't make me over, you know,
Furness."
She had managed part of a cigarette, and
then put it down.
Nor did he try to fool himself as to Holly's
attitude to him. He had made no real headway
with her. He could still feel the recoil as he
put his arms around her, and her unconscious
effort to get away.
"Don't you like me to hold you?"
"But I feel so silly!"
"It isn't silly to be in my arms."
In the light-hearted but seriously pleasure-
hunting group he knew best, girls gave their
kisses so easily that they lost value. A caress
had no more significance to them than a hand-
clasp, hardly as much. Holly's withdrawals
therefore had the effect of stimulating his pas-
sion for her, and his vanity refused to admit
the reason for them.
And the trap closed down. He brought her
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
presents, sent her flowers. Mostly he saw her in
the afternoons, as he was hurrying home to
dress for a dinner somewhere afterward: hold-
ing desperately to his place in the sun, trying to
have his cake and eat it too.
He had a fair income. His apartment was of
the studio type, and now and then he sent out
cards, and his Filipino servant Miguel brought
in an assistant or two and he gave a party.
Somebody sang, or he had a pianist and they
danced, and the pantry became an extemporized
bar. They were gay but sufficiently decorous,
and they had had a certain vogue.
He had intended to give one for Holly after
the engagement was announced, but the failure
of his other campaign killed that idea. "After-
ward, if they want me, they will have to take
her too," he reflected. But he was not as certain
as he pretended to himself that "they" would
want him. Like James, he used the word "they"
rather often.
On the same evening, then, that James saw
the announcement that Tom Bayne had been
pardoned, Furness saw it, read it carefully, and
flung down the paper angrily.
A dead scandal was one thing; a resurrected
scandal in a morning coat, still with the prison
pallor on its face, walking up the aisle at St.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
Andrews, was another. Of course it wouldn't
be; the Baynes had too much sense for that. It
simply meant no wedding. It meant going to
the City Hall or wherever one did go, and going
through a formula more or less clandestinely.
It meant—oh, hell!
He got into his dinner clothes morosely. At
the Willoughby-Joneses', where he was dining,
he thought a small silence followed the an-
nouncement of his name, but conversation
started again almost at once. He moved from
group to group, watching with his pale blue
eyes for any reservation, any indication of the
social ticker that his stock had gone down. But
there was none; society has its weaknesses,
but it is well bred. It ignores what it cannot
cover.
It was after dinner, when the men moved
in a body from the library to rejoin the
women that he had his first words with his
histess.
"I suppose you've seen it, Furney?"
"Yes."
"What are you going to do about it?"
"What is there to do? Of course, the church
wedding's off."
"But you're going through with it?"
"I'd hardly call it that," he said, showing a
9i


TWO FLIGHTS UP
certain resentment. "The marriage will go on,
naturally. It will be quiet, that's all."
"And you'll be quiet afterward," said Mrs.
Willoughby-Jones. "I'm being brutal for your
own good, Furney. How many evenings do you
dine at home now? How are you going to get
along without all this?" She gestured toward
the crowded, noisy room with her fan. "How
long will it last?"
"As long as I can make it last," he said
doggedly. But he was not so sure.
He won quite a little money that night at
bridge, and somebody said to him:
"Does your—does Miss Bayne play?"
"No. She doesn't," he admitted.
There was a silence after that, and he went
on playing his hand. But it came to him that all
these people, all his world, disapproved of his
marriage and expected it to fail. It roused some-
thing obstinate in him.
"I'll show them," he told himself. "They're
not marrying her; I am."
And he felt a warm and voluptuous glow. It
persisted until the small hours, when he finally
pocketed his winnings and started home, and it
drove him out of his way in his'car to pass the
Bayne house on Kelsey Street.
The house, as he had expected, was dark, but
92


TWO FLIGHTS UP
out of a small dormer window on the top floor
came a faint glow of light.
He concluded that "Hilda" was keeping late
hours!
93


CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WITH THE SUITCASE OUT OF THE
house Holly felt that she could breathe again.
She carried up her mother's tray and coaxed
her to eat some breakfast, but Mrs. Bayne was
querulous and depressed.
"If they had only kept him another month!"
she said. "Take this thing away; I can't eat
with this hanging over my head."
"Still, if he is really ill"
"They have doctors there, and a hospital. A
good hospital. I've seen it. Anyhow, I don't
believe he's so ill. He's only been doing clerical
work there; he's had it easy enough."
"You don't really feel that way, Mother."
"Certainly I do. Another month or so
wouldn't have hurt him after all these years.
And he knows about the wedding. I sent him the
announcements from the papers."
"Let's not think about the wedding just now.
We'll have to make some plans. I can move up
to Aunt Margaret's room, and he can have
mine. I'll fix the bed now and get ready."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"You can't go to Margaret's room. I'm not
going to have you on the same floor with that
wretched man. I've seen the way be looks at
you. I'm not blind."
Holly's pale face flushed.
"Father can't climb all those stairs. And—"
she hesitated—"I don't suppose you want him
in here?"
"You can put up the cot in the nursery." It
was still the nursery, after all these years.
"Very well," said Holly quietly. "That's what
I'll do. But I'll go there myself, Mother. It's
quite comfortable."
She went out, taking the tray with her. She
was hardly capable of consecutive thought, but
there was room in her mind for a great thank-
fulness. The suitcase and all it contained was
gone, and downtown that portion of her trouble
at least was being straightened out. True, she
dreaded the moment when Mrs. Bayne would
go to the attic again and find out what had
happened. Not that there would be a scene.
The very facts precluded that. But there would
be a shock.
She tried to think of some way to avoid that
shock, but without success.
The morning wore on. She worked hard; but
then, she was accustomed to that. Now and then
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
the relation of the new situation to her marriage
obtruded itself, but she drove it away. Time for
that when they came to it. But in the back of
her mind she was puzzling over it. How could
she go away and leave those two there together?
A sick man and an ailing, helpless woman?
For Mrs. Bayne was not well. Holly could
not leave her, even to go to Margaret's. At half-
past eleven, there being no telephone in the
house, she went to Simmons's grocery store and
called her up, but the Cox apartment did not
answer, and she went back again, vaguely
uneasy.
At noon she carried up another tray. Mrs.
Bayne was up in a chair by that time; she looked
really ill, but she would not have a doctor.
"Have you heard from Furness yet?"
"No. Of course he's busy, and with no tele-
phone"
"Just the same, he might have sent you some
word. He must know we are anxious."
"I'm not anxious, Mother. If he would let a
thing like this keep him away, a thing he always
knew had to happen sometime, then it's better
to learn it now rather than later on."
At one o'clock, however, there came a box of
roses and his card. "Always thine" it read, in
his affected manner. She carried the flowers to
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
her mother's room and was completely routed
by the relief in Mrs. Bayne's face.
"Then it's all right!" she said. "I really have
been terrified, Holly. If anything goes wrong
now, I really think it will finish me."
She put her handkerchief to her eyes, that
soft bit of fresh linen with her initials in the
corner, A. H. B., which was always in her hand.
Holly could not remember her mother without
a handkerchief; and when, later on, one of them
played its small part in her story, the mere sight
of it was to bring up not only every crisis of
her life, it was to bring up that life itself, day
by day and hour by hour.
"Nothing will go wrong, Mother," Holly told
her.
It was about two o'clock when the bell rang.
Mrs. Bayne slept quietly on her couch, a laven-
der slumber robe drawn over her, and the scent
of the roses heavy in the room. Downstairs,
Holly had dusted the drawing room and laid
out the tea table—if her mother wakened and
came down, it would never do for her to find it
unready—and was standing in front of an old
photograph of her father which she had brought
from the disused library across the hall, where
like her father himself it had been shelved for
many years.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
He must not, she reasoned, ever guess that
it had been hidden away.
It was out of date now. Mr. Bayne had been
taken in his dress clothes, after the fashion of
twenty years ago. Over a broad and high ex-
panse of snowy white shirt bosom and collar he
looked into his daughter's eyes, handsome and
debonair.
"Poor Father!" said Holly, and dusting the
glass, placed the photograph on a table.
She had not seen him for many years, and
she had never known him well, but acting on
impulse she went across the hall into the closed
library, and wrote a telegram.
"So glad you are coming. Welcome home and
much love."
After a little hesitation, she signed both her
mother's name and her own.
The library had been his room, as the draw-
ing room had been her mother's. It was hardly
ever opened now; the matter of heating it had
been a factor, but Holly knew too that as defi-
nitely as her mother had shut her husband out
of her life, she had closed and sheeted the room
which had been his.
The anger Holly had felt the night before
was lost in pity. He had stolen, and he had not
only spent; he had hidden away a part of that
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
stolen wealth in that very house. He was dying
and he had made no attempt at restitution. But
he was dying; he could not live long.
And then suddenly there came to her mind
her mother's face, on the day she came home
from the penitentiary; and later on, her sup-
pressed excitement, the times when she had sat
like someone who nursed a secret, the haste as to
the wedding and the trousseau.
Suppose on that visit of hers he had told her?
Suppose she had not happened on the suitcase
but had known it was there? Suppose he had
wanted to make restitution, to come back clean,
and had told her; and out of her dire need her
mother
She sat up suddenly. The doorbell was furi-
ously ringing.
99


CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JAMES COX WAS ENORMOUSLY PROUD
of his stock. He liked, when he was not busy,
to run his hand down over his tidy shelves and
to realize that he could tell its very quality by
touch. And when he opened up the blue wrap-
pers from his best tablecloths it was as though
he gained a vicarious splendour from their
quality.
"Wonderful piece of work, this," he would
say. "Grace any table! Make any sort of food
taste good, eh?"
He was completely out of patience with the
new vogue for doilies, although he had to sell
them. The nearest thing he had ever come to a
quarrel with Margaret was on that very ques-
tion. He came home one evening to find the
table set with small bits of linen, scalloped by
her own busy hands, little islands of white in a
shining sea of imitation mahogany.
"What's this you've got on the table?"
"Don't you like them?"
zoo


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Oh, they're all right," he said grudgingly.
He didn't like to hurt her. "But if you ask me,
give me honest food on an honest linen cloth."
"Then off they go!" said Margaret, shame-
lessly and spinelessly loving. "I don't care for
them myself. I just thought"
Honest linen! Honest everything. That was
James Cox.
On the day, then, that Warrington had car-
ried the suitcase to Margaret, James was behind
his counter. They had opened up a new shipment
in the stockroom, and huge baskets were stiM
being trundled along the aisles.
He was in a state of suppressed excitement,
as he was always when new stock came in, and
so he did not notice that he was being quickly
observed from a near-by counter. Nor was his
feeling when he was summoned to the man-
ager's office other than one of irritation at being
interrupted. He never saw the light-stepping,
rather stout man who followed him there and
unceremoniously entered after him.
The office was empty. James, hearing the
door close behind him, turned and confronted
this gentleman.
"Your name Cox?" said the stranger.
"Yes."
IOI


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Live at Number Eleven, Aurelia Apart-
ments?"
James suddenly stopped breathing. Some-
thing had happened to Margaret!
"I do," he stammered. "I live there. What's
wrong? For God's sake, what's the matter?"
"Don't get excited, Mr. Cox. Sit down. I
only want to ask you some questions."
"My wife"
"She's all right, so far as I know. Mr. Cox,
you are related to a family named Bayne, I
believe, on Kelsey Street?"
Mr. Cox had recovered, and now he stiffened.
"Only by marriage. My wife is Mrs. Bayne's
sister."
"But you are on pretty friendly terms with
the family?"
"Never been in the house," said Mr. Cox,
unflaggingly honest. "They don't like me, and
I don't like them. The girl's all right," he added
conscientiously.
"Do you know a young man named War-
rington who has a room there?"
"Never saw him but once," said James. But
he looked self-conscious, as well he might, re-
calling that amazing evening; and the detective
saw it.
"But your wife knows him? Rather well?"
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
Trust that woman to make trouble if she could.
A suitcase from the
"I don't know anything about any suitcase,"
he said, surly now. "As for my wife hiding
anything, she's got nothing to hide, and I'm
damn well ready to tell you that. And what
business is it of yours, anyhow?"
Amazingly, he was looking at a badge the
officer uncovered. James's hands began to sweat.
They were cold and clammy. He got out his
handkerchief and wiped them.
"I'm telling you. If you don't know about
this suitcase, then your wife does, all right."
He considered that warily. They weren't go-
ing to catch James Cox napping, not they. And
Margaret wasn't going to be in this, not by a
darned sight.
"All right," he said. "If there's a suitcase
there and you're interested in it, we'll say it's
mine and let it go at that. Now, what about it?"
"That's right," said the detective more
affably. "No need of dragging a woman in if
we can help it. You admit it's your suitcase?"
"Wait a minute! I'll admit that the only suit-
case I know about in the flat is mine, and that's
as far as I'll go."
He was rather pleased with this masterpiece
of strategy; they hadn't caught him napping.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
No, sir. You had to go some to catch James
Cox asleep on his feet. However, the detective,
as Mr. Cox now knew him to be, only yawned
slightly and looked at his watch.
"If you'll get your hat," he said, "we'll wan-
der over to the City Hall. District Attorney
wants to talk to you."
"I'm not free here until twelve-thirty."
"Oh, you're free enough," said the detective
amiably. "That's all fixed. You just get your
things and come along."
There was an authority in that "come along"
that froze Mr. Cox to the marrow of his in-
significant bones. But it would never do to
show it.
"You seem damned certain I'm coming," he
snapped.
"I am damned certain," said the detective.
105


.CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HAVING FAILED IN HIS FIRST PLAN AT
the bank, Warrington found himself rather at
a loose end. He had no idea what further steps
to take. He felt that a legal opinion would help
him out, but also that he had no right to take an
attorney into his confidence without consulting
Holly first.
His own opinion was that, although he had
planted what amounted to a bomb in the Cox
household, there was no reason to believe that
anybody was waiting to touch off the fuse.
Nevertheless, he had sold a stolen bond, and
it was with mixed feelings that he went some-
what belatedly to the office. Everything there
was the same as usual, apparently. Hawkins,
with a green shade over his eyes, was working
at the board, and half a dozen men sat or stood
watching it. The ticker rattled on, like a dis-
tant machine gun; when he had first gone into
the office, it often took him back to the war;
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
of money, and Ma threw a celebration that
night."
However, bit by bit out of a mass of
extraneous material, he dug out the story.
Bayne had tried to make a get-away, but had
failed; he had spent a good bit, but some of it
had never been accounted for.
"Maybe he speculated," she said, with a
glance at the swinging doors and the group be-
yond them. "Everybody's doing it."
He had not left the office more than five
minutes when they came after him.
"How should I know where he's gone?" Miss
Sharp said, eying the detective shrewdly. She
hardly needed the sight of the badge to "put
her wise," she said later.
"But you're expecting him back this morn-
ing?"
"Depends on how far he's gone," she told
him. "What's he been doing? Bootlegging, or
dodging his income tax?"
"Wait until he comes back and you'll find
out."
She was curious but unanxious.
But as luck would have it, Warrington did
not go back. He went around to see a certain
young man, the only attorney he knew in the
city, for he needed advice, and he trusted
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
Meyer's discretion. Meyer, however, was argu-
ing a case at the Courthouse, and after waiting
an hour for him, he gave up and went away.
Save for a sense of inner urgency, there
seemed to be no immediate danger. He decided
to think the matter over, and having a prospec-
tive customer out of town, he took an inter-
urban car and proceeded half-heartedly to the
day's work.
It is rather interesting to note that had
he taken a train instead, he would have been
under arrest before he knew it. As things were,
however, he sat safely enough in the street car,
a big, heavy-shouldered young man, much like
any other big and heavy-shouldered young man,
save perhaps for a slightly dogged look about
his mouth and chin and a certain grave direct-
ness in his eyes. And after a while he resolutely
put the Baynes, including Holly, out of his
mind and concentrated on the business before
him.
He sold five bonds, which netted him the
munificent sum of ten dollars. But before he
did it, he had to lunch with the buyer and stop
in to see his family.
"Do you good," said the customer. "You
fellows who sell bonds ought to see what it's
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
all about. I buy bonds to protect my family.
So does everybody else. If I wanted to make
money, I'd buy stocks."
Not important, all this, save that it made him
very late getting back to the city, and that it
sent him back rather thoughtful. Whether a
fellow sold bonds or bought them, he ought to
be working for somebody besides himself.
He drew a long breath, as he sat in the
car, and then stirred impatiently. He could see
Holly as she had been that morning in the lower
hall, thin and wretched; and he could see Mar-
garet Cox, at the end of her rope too, lying
down on the kitchen floor to end everything in
one last desperate gesture.
But Margaret hadn't. She had had the cour-
age to pull out and to take happiness where she
found it. He did not for a moment believe that
Holly would.
Once in the city again, however, his mind re-
turned to the suitcase. He looked at his watch.
The banks were closed now, and the office soon
would be. Hardly worth while going back. Per-
haps he'd better go home and tell Holly what
he had done—or rather had not done. He got
out and walked across town, and a stray dog
from somewhere picked him up and followed
along.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
It was a wretched creature, emaciated and
despondent, but when he stopped and tried to
turn it back, it looked up at him with eyes at
once so hopeful and so hungry that he finally
gave up the attempt. He stopped at a dairy and
bought a bottle of milk, as the best way to break
its long fast, and with this in a newspaper under
his arm, and the dog at his heels, reached the
end of Kelsey Street.
Later on, he was to thank this impulse for a
few hours' respite—that and his pride, per-
haps. For from a block away he saw Brooks's
car in front of the house, and was not minded to
pass the drawing-room door, and that gentle-
man inside it, with his present entourage.
He was irritated as he turned to the right
along a side street, and so along an alleyway
to the gate leading into the yard of the house,
irritated and depressed.
"I'll get out," he told himself. "That's what
I'll do. Get out from under. It's only by chance
I'm here anyhow. What the devil would they
have done if I hadn't turned up?"
He slammed the gate so violently that he
set the dog to shivering, and ashamed of that,
he bent down and stroked its head. He felt bet-
ter after that, and more gentle, as almost all
do who have touched in friendliness a friendless
in
-


CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MARGARET HAD NOT BEEN IN THE
Bayne house since her marriage.
"It's like this," James had said. "If I'm not
good enough for them, my wife isn't either.
Let them come to you; I don't object so long
as I'm not here. But you don't need them any
more. The shoe's on the other foot, my girl.
Let them have their pride; I've got mine too."
She had acquiesced. She loved Holly, but
Annie Bayne had never more than tolerated her,
and the house itself held only bitter memories.
And now, when in answer to the furious
ringing of the bell Holly opened the door, Mar-
garet was there. A strange Margaret, a wild-
eyed, disheveled Margaret, her nose red with
weeping, her gloves a crumpled ball in her hand.
Since when had Margaret forgotten that no
lady appears on the street ungloved?
Holly stood staring at her, and Margaret
brushed past and into the hall with a sort of
savage violence.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
tHe hall. "What has happened? Is it Mr. Cox?"
The name brought Margaret to herself like
an electric shock. She stopped crying and stared
with red-rimmed hostile eyes at Holly.
"You know perfectly well what it is. You
must know."
"But I don't. He isn't hurt or sick, is he?"
"Then your mother knows! It was like her,
just when we were so happy, and no thanks to
her for that, either. When did she ever think
of anybody but herself? And to help that man,
after the way he's ruined her life!"
"What man?"
"Your father. Get away from that door,
Holly. I don't care whether she's asleep or not.
I'm not, and I'm going up."
"I'll let you up, of course, but tell me first.
You haven't told me a thing."
Margaret gazed at her bitterly.
"Oh, I'll tell you, all right," she said. "My
James—my honest James, who never had a
wrong thought in his life—has been arrested
for receiving stolen goods."
Holly felt a vague sense of relief. Somehow,
nothing but murder or sudden death had seemed
to justify Margaret's woe. She drew a long
breath.
"But of course it's a mistake," she said
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
gently. "He's been at the store too long for
them to believe he'd do anything wrong now."
Suddenly Margaret laughed, a hysterical
high-pitched laugh that ended in a wail.
"At the store!" she said. "At his own home.
In that suitcase your mother sent down."
"Oh, no," said Holly. "Oh, no!"
"Oh, yes," sneered Margaret. "She was using
me, as she's always used me. I dare say your
father was to call and get it and then abscond
for Europe or some place. She'd do anything
to get rid of him, even to—killing my husband.
And it will kill him. If you could see him,
sitting in the District Attorney's office, with his
poor head bowed, and not even knowing what
it's all about! And when I told them, they didn't
believe me!"
She gave a vicious jerk at her hat and moved
toward the door.
"Sick or well," she said, "she's going to get
out of bed and go down there. Let them jail
her."
"Let them jail me," said Holly quietly. "You
see, I sent the suitcase, Aunt Margaret. She
doesn't know anything about it."
Margaret stopped, her hand on the knob.
"You?"
Next to James, she loved Holly. Together
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
they had run the house and counted the pennies.
It was to her, not to her mother, that the girl
had gone with the small worries, the little snubs,
the constant struggle between gentility and
poverty which had made up their lives. She came
back into the room.
"Why did you do it?"
"Because she had found it. She'd already sold
one bond; I was afraid she would sell some
more."
The full import of the thing dawned on Mar-
garet slowly.
"She sold a bond," she repeated slowly.
"Then—to clear James we would have to im-
plicate her. Oh, my God, Holly! What are we
going to do?"
118


CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
AT SIX O'CLOCK HOLLY CAME HOME.
She dragged herself up the steps and stood
there to compose herself, but Mrs. Bayne's
sharp ears had heard her, and she flung the
door wide.
"Well, I must say!" she said with asperity.
"Didn't you know Furness was coming?"
"I couldn't make it any sooner."
"But where on earth have you been?"
"With Aunt Margaret."
She took off her hat, and in the glare of the
hall chandelier she looked fairly extinguished,
her eyes dull and her face colourless. The
smile she managed to summon made her look
appealingly childish; and Furness, coming into
the hall, took advantage of her lack of resistance
to put an arm around her.
"You come in here and sit down," he said
authoritatively. "That's the girl. Now put your
head back, and I'll get some tea."
Mrs. Bayne left them there and went up the
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
stairs, tight-lipped and still considerably shaken.
Strange thoughts had been running through
her mind during that vigil at the front door,
strange and terrifying thoughts. But that was
all over now. Holly had been upset by the tele-
gram and had gone to Margaret. She had
always gone to Margaret when in trouble.
All over—unless Holly had got some non-
sense into her head about marrying Furness.
He had seemed all right. But he had not kissed
her when she came in. Did that mean
She walked the floor; her life seemed to be
one anxiety after another.
In the drawing room Furness made no ad-
vances to Holly. He saw that she was in no
mood for them. And she understood and liked
him for it; as he moved about, expertly pre-
paring the tea, she was perhaps fonder of him
than she had ever been before. He didn't talk. If
what she took for kindness was really tact, it
made no difference; for after all, behind most
tactfulness is consideration.
When he gave her the cup his fingers touched
hers, and he reached down and took her other
hand, judicially.
"You're cold," he said, and going out into
the hall returned with his overcoat and tucked
it about her. "Don't talk yet," he told her.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
ful; somehow she had never thought of him as
either of them, particularly. She was extremely
touched, and inside her breast her heart felt
like a lump of ice. She didn't love him. She
never would love him.
In the silence that fell between them, filled
with relief on Furness's part and a hundred
flashing uncompleted thoughts on hers, she
could hear faint, regular movements overhead,
and knew that her mother was pacing the floor
of her room, anxious, terrified, waiting for the
outcome of the interview.
She stirred a little and put down her cup, and
as if he had been awaiting this signal, Furness
came over and sat down beside her.
"You poor darling!" he said. "And did you
think I might let you go?" He put his arm
around her and drew her closer. "I'll never let
you go," he told her. "Never!"
There was more passion in the kiss he gave
her than he had ever permitted himself before.
And she closed her eyes and submitted to it,
meekly, helplessly. What else was there to do?
How could he know that when she closed her
eyes it was to see James Cox huddled in a
chair in the District Attorney's office, gazing
out with dull, bewildered eyes at a world which
had suddenly turned unfriendly? And to see
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
Aunt Margaret, too, her hand on James's
shoulder, ugly and militant, challenging that
world.
Holly could still hear his voice: "Shut up,
Margaret, for God's sake! This has nothing to
do with you."
"It has everything to do with me—every-
thing!"
Holly let Furness out, and then waited for a
moment at the foot of the stairs, preparing her-
self for the interview that was waiting above.
Glancing up, she saw a light, and knew Mrs.
Bayne was at her door, or in the upper hall,
listening, waiting.
She picked up her gloves and slowly made
her way up; and her mother, hearing her,
quietly closed her door and sat down on a chair.
When Holly went in she was holding a book as
though she had been reading.
"Well," she said, "I dare say it's all right?"
Holly stood just inside the door. She had
carried up her hat, and now she stood with it
in her hands, straightening the ribbons and
staring at it. "Yes," she answered after a
moment. "So far as he is concerned, it's all
right."
"As he is concerned?" said her mother
sharply. "I don't understand you."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"You see, Mother," she said slowly, "he is
really ill if he can't travel."
Mrs. Bayne was propped up in bed with a
silk jacket over her shoulders. She felt easier
sitting up. Beside her the reading lamp sent a
soft rosy glow over her, making her look
younger, almost childish.
"Oh, yes," she said. "I forgot to give you
that. It gives us a chance to breathe, anyhow."
Holly turned out the other lights and raised
a window. She stood there for a minute or two,
inhaling the cold night air. Her mother's heart-
lessness where her father was concerned was
nothing new to her. It was compounded of old
neglects and old frictions, as well as the final
culminating matter of his disgrace.
She wondered vaguely if there had ever been
any love between them, in the way she herself
thought of love. She tried to look back to the
days when the two of them had occupied that
very chamber, but the low spots of that early
life had left no impression on her; only the
high lights, of dinners and evening clothes, con-
stant movement, comings and goings, cars and
callers, had remained with her.
And all the time she knew her mind was evad-
ing what it must face. She had gone to the
District Attorney's office with Margaret, de-
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
termined to make a clean breast of the matter
and throw herself on his mercy. After all, he
was a human being; he would understand. And
the bank was getting back what it had never
expected. It could afford to be lenient.
True, one bond was missing, but she would
pay that back. She could go to work and save;
she would work her fingers to the bone. And
she would say she had given the bond to Mr.
Warrington to sell. That ought to fix that.
But the District Attorney had been in court,
and his assistant had been arranging about
James Cox's bond. People kept coming in and
going out, and a little man with shrewd eyes
and a kindly mouth, who turned out to be one
of Mr. Cox's employers, Mr. Steinfeldt, was
haranguing James as he huddled in his chair.
"We don't do this for everybody, Mr. Cox,
y'understand," he said. "But when people stick
by Steinfeldt and Roder, we stick by them.
Only the other day I said to Mr. Roder: 'Do the
square thing by our people, and they've got no
comeback.' See?"
"I'm much obliged to you," said James Cox
dully.
"Now, as I figure it," Mr. Steinfeldt went on,
expanding, "you've been a fool. You don't mind
my saying that, Mrs. Cox? This aristocratic
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
sister-in-law of yours has put one over, see?
She knew Bayne was getting out and would be
wanting to get away somewhere, so she sends
the loot where he can pick it up easy. And she
sells one bond, see, so he can get off."
"I guess that's about it," said James Cox
humbly.
And Holly had ignored Margaret's warning
glance and thrown her hat into the ring.
"How do you, know my mother sold the
bond?" she demanded.
"You've been very kind, Mr. Steinfeldt, but
you have no right to accuse her without know-
ing anything about it."
But Mr. Steinfeldt had only smiled at her and
had taken no offense.
"And I suppose you'd say you did it, eh?" he
said shrewdly. "You'd say to me, 'Mr. Stein-
feldt, I took that bond and sold it,' eh? Don't
say that, miss, because I wouldn't believe it
anyhow."
And that had been all. Mr. Cox and Aunt
Margaret had gone down in the elevator with
her, a strange, humbled Mr. Cox, stepping
apologetically out of people's way, as if he had
done something he shouldn't: a silent, defeated
Mr. Cox, his flag down and his banner trailing
in the dust. ...
128


CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1
THERE WAS NO DOUBT THAT THE
house was being watched, nor any doubt in
Warrington's mind as to why.
"They'd have picked me up before this if it
hadn't been for that dog," he considered
grimly.
He retreated from the window and stood in
the centre of the darkened room, and swaying
branches by the street lamps threw ghostly
shadows on the walls. He might have been a
ghost himself, so still he stood.
All sorts of thoughts were hurtling through
his brain. Suppose the fellow had followed him
that morning and saw him leave the suitcase
at the Cox apartment? That would involve them
undoubtedly; and the fact of Holly's mysterious
absence that afternoon began to obtrude itself.
Suppose it had already involved them!
He went back to the window again and saw
that the Brooks car was still there. A moment
later, however, he heard the door close and
130


TWO FLIGHTS UP
watched it moving off, and he started down the
stairs. He must see Holly and learn what had
happened. But he did not go down.
Mrs. Bayne was on the landing below, peer-
ing down so absorbedly that she had not heard
him.
"Scared!" he said to himself. "Knows some-
thing's wrong, and doesn't know what it is."
Well, let her be scared. She had got them
ill into a pretty mess. She and her fine-lady ways
and her shallow, unscrupulous mind. Only, she
wasn't going to involve Holly; he'd damn' well
take care of that.
He heard Holly go into her mother's room
and the door close; and leaving his own door
open, he sat down in the worn chair by his
empty hearth and waited as patiently as he
could. He had an idea, possibly unfounded, that
to turn on his lights would be to bring a ring
at the bell and perhaps a warrant for his arrest.
Yet there were moments as he sat there when
the whole situation seemed not only incredible
but ridiculous. A dozen other things might
account for the man across the street; it was
because he himself felt guilty that he was so
sure the espionage was for him.
Odd, how even to be suspected of wrong-
doing undermined a man's morale!
131


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"The police found it," she told him. "Some-
body must have followed you."
"What have they done?"
"They've arrested Mr. Cox."
She told him all, omitting nothing' except her
own resolution to say she had sold the bond: of
the arrest, and Margaret's visit, and of Mr.
Steinfeldt and the bond; and when she had
finished—
"You poor child!" he said. "I'd have done
anything in the world for you, and I've let you
in for this."
"You've only done what I asked you to do."
"I've been stupid—criminally, damnably
stupid. That's all."
"It is we who have been both stupid and—
criminal," she said painfully. "It has nothing
to do with you. You'd better not try to save us.
You'd better just go away and leave us. We're
sinking, anyhow."
"You know I can't do that," he said. "You
know, if you know anything in the world, that
what concerns you concerns me. Always. I'm
not undercutting Brooks or anything of that
sort. I know you are—not for me or I for you.
I'm not making love to you, Holly. I just want
you to know how things are with me. Then you
won't talk about my getting out."
133


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"You know I have to marry Furness, don't
you?" she said, in a hushed voice.
"I know that. At least—I'm accepting it. I'm
only offering you an anchor to windward."
He held out his hand, and she took it. Then
she did something that fairly shook his resolu-
tion; she put the hand to her cheek and held it
there a moment. "You are the best man I ever
knew," she said wistfully, and dropped it.
She had told him what she knew—little more
than he had already surmised. Not for a
moment did she see him actually involved in
the business. James Cox was arrested, and Mr.
Steinfeldt had gone on his bond; she had her-
self gone down to see the District Attorney, Mr.
Phelps, but he had been in court and had not
returned to the office afterward.
She had gone back home with Margaret and
James, and things there were heartbreaking.
James just sat in a chair and would not speak.
"I'll soon fix that," Warrington told her.
"Cox isn't in this thing at all. I'll go down and
see him to-night and tell him so."
He wanted desperately to take her in his arms
before, obedient to his order, she started up to
bed. He may have been wrong, too, but he
thought she might not have minded. She looked
as though she needed the protecting clasp of
134


CHAPTER NINETEEN
WARRINGTON WAS NOT CERTAIN THAT
the yard and the gate to it were being watched.
He had an idea that Cox had been pretty care-
fully guarded, and that they hoped to catch
himself on his way home, still ignorant of what
had occurred.
Anyhow, he had to take that chance. His hat
was on the table in the hall; he left his over-
coat, as art impediment to what might turn out
to be quick action, and went back to the kitchen.
With his hand on the outer door, however, he
remembered the dog and swore softly.
"Might as well raise an alarm and be done
with it," he reflected grimly.
But out that way he would have to go if he
went at all, and the dog was quiet for the time.
The kitchen was dark, and he opened the door
cautiously and slid through it. Almost instantly
he felt the creature beside him, wriggling its
thin body and rubbing against him. He leaned
down and patted its head.
136


TWO FLIGHTS UP
fence he was breathing hard, and at the fifth
he came to an impasse. He had reached the
corner house, and it was surrounded by a high
brick wall, offering no finger hold whatever.
In another minute the gate would open.
There was a door, slightly ajar, at the rear
of the house beside him, and he did the only
thing he could think of—ran up the steps,
through the door, and closed it behind him. The
kitchen was empty, but someone was moving in
the pantry. He had only settled his tie and taken
off his hat when an elderly cook entered. He
smiled at her.
"Sorry," he said. "I knocked, but nobody
answered. My dog got away a few minutes
ago, and I thought he came into your yard."
"Haven't seen him," said the woman, eying
him.
"He's strange in this neighbourhood," he
told her, listening intently. "I just got him to-
day."
"Well, what do you want me to do about it?"
she demanded. "I'm too busy to stop and cry."
To signify her lack of interest she went to the
stove, and with her back turned Warrington
managed to turn the key in the door behind
him. He was just in time; heavy footsteps ran
138


TWO FLIGHTS UP
across the yard, and the next instant they began
to climb the steps.
He looked about him. The house in ground
plan was not unlike the Baynes's. In that case
the door there should lead to the hall. He
measured the distance with his eye, and as a
peremptory knock came to the kitchen door,
and the woman grumbling turned to answer, he
opened it and slipped through.
He was in a closet.
Of the detective's questions and the woman's
excited answers he heard little or nothing. The
shock, plus the beating of his heart in his ears,
almost deafened him, and the unreality of his
situation dazed him. If he had committed a
murder, he could not have shown guilt more
clearly than by this whole absurd performance.
And all that in the drawing of a breath or
two.
"He was right here when you knocked," the
woman was saying. "I didn't even hear him go.
He locked that door, too."
"He's run through the house. Which door?"
The officer's hand was actually on the knob of
the closet, but the cook had opened another door
and was peering through it.
"If he did, he's gone for sure."
She followed the officer as he ran forward,
i39


TWO FLIGHTS UP
and Warrington, listening with strained ears,
heard them in the front of the house. Very
quietly he made his exit into the yard again and
out the rear gate.
He doubled on his tracks, going back past the
Bayne house and so out into a cross street
farther down. Not until he had put a half-dozen
blocks between himself and the search did he
stop and take his bearings.
He had torn one trouser knee open and
skinned both of his hands badly. In addition his
collar and shirt were disreputable beyond words,
and somewhere he had lost his hat. Afterward
he was to look back on that flight of his as a
sort of nightmare, as useless as a bad dream
and much more disastrous. Better, far better, to
have walked out the front door and given him-
self up.
Hatless, then, dirty and torn, he made his
way toward the Cox apartment, taking back
streets and avoiding policemen whenever he
could. One can see him, I think, crossing lighted
areas with a bit of a swagger, the wind blowing
his hair about, and whistling valiantly for the
benefit of possible observers; giving the impres-
sion that he had just wandered out from some
near-by house to drop a letter in the box, or to
buy a postage stamp at the corner drug store.
140


TWO FLIGHTS TJF
And every now and then pausing, hands in
pockets, to take a casual glance to the rear.
And in such fashion did he reach the Aurelia
Apartments and, to a grin from the elevator
boy, proceed to the third floor.
"Look as though you'd been having trouble,"
said that youth, eying him.
"Motorcycle turned over," said Warrington
shamelessly. He considered that rather good;
he had not said that his motorcycle had turned
over. He smoothed his hair with his hands.
In spite of his morbid reflections earlier in
the evening, he still could not regard either
James Cox or himself as seriously involved.
A straightforward story from him, and it must
somehow clear up. The whole thing was absurd.
It was monstrous. The bank ought to be darned
glad to get the securities back and no questions
asked.
With this in his mind, and the memory of
Holly's face as she had looked down from the
angle of the staircase, he rang the bell of the
Cox apartment.
Margaret opened the door. Even before she
did so he was conscious of a deathlike stillness
beyond it, and with his first sight of her face,
he knew that tragedy, sheer stark tragedy, had
entered the little flat.
141


TW O FLIGHTS UI»
"Oh, it's you," she said tonelessly. "Come
in."
James was sitting in a chair. Just sitting,
with no newspaper about him, no cigar in his
hand to waft its heavy masculine odour into the
bedroom. He was sitting there, as he had sat
almost ever since their return, staring straight
ahead and not moving. . . .
"Don't you want any dinner, James?"
"No, thanks."
"I have broiled steak. You like that, James."
"I'm not hungry."
Finally Margaret had fixed him a tray and
put it on the folding card table, extended before
him; he had roused at that and had picked up the
coffee cup. Then he groaned and put it down
again.
"Sorry," he said thickly. "Maybe later
on"
She knew he was afraid she would see that
his hand was trembling.
She could not sew; she could not do any-
thing. Once she had picked up her work basket,
and he had seen the bit of Holly's wedding dress
she was working on. It was the only thing that
had roused him.
"Put that down," he said. "You're through
with them, my girl. Good and through."
142


TWO FLIGHTS UP
And she had silently put it away, out of
sight. . . .
Into this situation, then, Warrington stepped
as he entered the door. He had not seen Cox
since the night he had struck the policeman, but
the crushed figure in the chair bore little re-
semblance to the truculent individual of that
evening.
"James," Margaret said, "you remember Mr.
Warrington, don't you ? You know he was"
But her voice trailed off. At the name a
change came over James's face. His neck seemed
to swell, his voice to flatten and thicken.
"So it's you!" he said, slowly getting up.
"You, you damned"
"James!"
"Get out of that door or I'll kill you," said
James, still in the strange voice. "I mean it. Off
with you! Get out of the way, Margaret."
He stood, his hands clenched and head low-
ered, impressive, dangerous.
"You dirty swine," he said, "stealing into an
honest man's home and hiding your filthy stuff
here!"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Cox. That wasn't the inten-
tion."
"Oh, it wasn't, eh? Then what in hell was the
intention? Do you know what they've done to
i43


TWO FLIGHTS UP
me? They've arrested me. I'm out on bond. If
it hadn't been for Steinfeldt, I'd be in jail to-
night. Me, James Cox! Honest James, they
call me at the store, and now I'm through.
Throughr
He sank back into his chair again, his fists
still clenched, and a vein in his forehead swollen
and throbbing.
Warrington glanced at Margaret. All the life
had gone out of her masklike face.
"They searched the flat after you left this
morning," she said, still in her toneless voice.
"Then they went to the store and arrested
him. For receiving stolen goods. Mr. Steinfeldt
went on his bond."
Suddenly James began to laugh. It was
hideous laughter, the chuckle of the martyr
dying from the foot-tickling torture.
"We've got to hand it to them," he said, be-
tween bursts of the horrible mirth. "They've
used us all for their own dirty ends. You too!
You and Margaret and me. Smart, they are. I
take my hat off to them. And I used to see that
hellhound of a woman marching through the
store like a duchess! Used to admire her, too.
May she"
Margaret put her hand over his mouth, and
he subsided like a child.
144


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"I won't have that sort of talk, James," she
said. "Mr. Warrington is going to tell us about
it, and we'll all see what we can do."
Warrington looked at her. Over James's
head she was gazing at him with peculiar in-
tentness.
"There isn't much to tell," she said. "Of
course, the charge won't stand. We'll fix that
up to-morrow. If anyone's guilty, I'm the one.
You see, the stuff was in the suitcase, hidden
under some boards in the attic. When it was
found"
"Who found it?" asked James.
The question was to Warrington, but it was
Margaret who replied.
"I've told you, James. It was Holly."
"And I don't believe it. It was that sister
of yours. I'll bet she's known it was there all
the time, too."
"I only know what Holly says."
But she was lying, deliberately and with a
purpose. Warrington read the appeal in her
eyes. Holly had told her the truth, but James
was not to know it. To tell him that Mrs. Bayne
had found the suitcase and sold a bond from
it was to put a weapon in his hands against her,
and one that, in his soreness and bitter humilia-
tion, he was sure to use. She had dragged him,
145


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"What's the use?" he said. "Don't you sup-
pose the Bayne house was searched from top
to bottom after Tom Bayne was arrested? I'm
not saying you knew, but somebody knew where
those securities were, and has known all along.
And don't tell me it was the girl. She couldn't
have been more than ten when it happened."
"If you mean my sister "Margaret
flared. But James took no notice of her.
"Y'see what I mean," he went on. "And
there's no use going to the District Attorney.
I gathered to-day he's been fighting this par-
don, and he's pretty sore. But I'm not through
fighting; I haven't begun yet. If they think I'm
going to sit down under this, they can think
again."
H7


.CHAPTER TWENTY,
IT WAS TEN O'CLOCK WHEN WARRING-
ton left them. He had a grateful glance and a
word or two from Margaret as she let him out,
but he was no farther along than when he had
arrived. Left alone, free to tell all the truth,
he would have been less confused, but he had
the naturally honest man's helplessness at hav-
ing to connive at a lie.
He went down and out into the street. There
was a roundsman standing on the pavement,
and to save his life he could not avoid a self-
conscious movement away from him.
"I'm afraid!" he muttered. "Afraid of a
policeman!"
Margaret had roughly drawn the knee of
his torn trousers together, and he had bor-
rowed James's cap. Strange to think that even
so small an incident as that, of borrowing a
cap, was to have its influence on his situation.
How long ago it seemed since Margaret, on
148


TWO FLIGHTS UP
the pavement at Kelsey Street with a shawl
over her head, had said:
"Sometimes he wears a cap. It is less trouble
when we go to the movies."
He plodded along the street.
Phelps, the District Attorney, lived out of
town. Warrington took a street car, but it was
eleven o'clock when he reached the house, and
that hard-working gentleman had already re-
tired. Persistent ringing of the doorbell finally
brought a sulky maid in a kimono, who told him
the family was in bed and not to be disturbed.
"Tell Mr. Phelps I've killed a man and want
to surrender myself," he said with a touch of
his old humour.
"There's a police station next to the carbarn,"
she told him, and closed the door in his face.
"Well," he reflected as he trudged down the
drive, "like the Irishman on Friday, the Lord
knows I've asked for fish."
At the all-night stand near the carbarn he
bought a newspaper and looked it over, but
there was nothing but a brief notice that
Thomas Bayne, imprisoned for embezzling
funds from the Harrison Bank, was ill in the
penitentiary hospital and, although pardoned,
was not yet able to leave.
"Keeping it under their hats," he considered.
149


TWO FLIGHTS UP
He still felt that a straightforward story
ought to clear everything up, at least so far as
he himself was concerned. For one thing, the
door man at the bank might remember him.
That would prove his good faith. But, on the
other hand, how was he to show that he had
not sold the bond for his own benefit, since
both Holly and Margaret Cox were determined
to keep Mrs. Bayne out of it? But he knew what
would happen if that question came up. Holly
would claim that she herself had given it to him
to sell.
He fairly ground his teeth with fury at the
thought. Better to see the District Attorney
early in the morning, before they bound him
to any more evasions, and clear the thing up.
Tell it all; that was the way. He had heard that
Phelps was a decent sort. He would under-
stand.
But he was going to play his own hand. He
had no intention of being arrested; that weak-
ened a man's case before he had a chance at it.
He would surrender himself in the morning,
and they would let him out later on his own
recognizance, probably. But the immediate prob-
lem of the night presented itself. He could not
go back to Kelsey Street.
150


TWO FLIGHTS UP
In the end he found a small and shabby
sanctuary in a third-rate hotel downtown, and
after locking the door took stock of himself in
the mirror.
"Gad!" he said. "It's just as well I didn't see
Phelps! He'd have run me in on general prin-
ciples."
Later on he rang the bell. "Anybody around
here to mend and press a suit of clothes?" he
asked the boy who came.
"Nope. Send them out for you in the morn-
ing.
"How long will it take?"
"How big's a lump of coal?" said the boy,
grinning. "Get them back early in the morn-
ing, maybe. Maybe not."
By offer of a bribe, however, he got a
promise of prompt action, and in his under-
garments began a long and fruitless pacing of
the room. Long after midnight he was still mov-
ing about, a ridiculous and highly anxious
figure. The more he thought about the matter,
the more certain he became that Holly would
sacrifice herself to save her mother. And from
something Margaret had told him outside the
flat as he left, he knew that this sacrifice was not
the absurdity it seemed on the surface.


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"We must keep my sister out of this," she
had said. "She has a bad heart. It might kill
her."
, He made, finally, a rather infuriated resolve:
darn it all, if somebody had to be the goat, he
would be. They weren't going to stand Holly
up and question her. But all his tenderness was
for Holly; for Mrs. Bayne he had only anger
and increasing resentment. To save that soft-
handed, gently unscrupulous aristocrat, he
might have to drag an unknown but honour-
able name in the dirt. And why? Because her
heart was weak, or she thought it was! Well,
why not let her take her shock? Other people
had to. Suppose poor Cox's heart had been
weak? Or Holly's?
A wave of resentment and anger fairly shook
him. He saw Mrs. Bayne at the door, watch-
ing spiderlike for Holly, lest the fly in the draw-
ing room escape. Again, he himself was looking
down the stair well, and she was below, listen-
ing furtively and hindering his own progress
down the stairs.
He counted his scores against her: Mar-
garet lying unconscious on the kitchen floor;
the night she had brought him the bond to sell,
and the play she had made on his sympathy;
Holly in the attic, staring with tragic eyes at
152


TWO FLIGHTS UP
able-bodied man of twenty-eight may be and yet
retain fragments of reason.
And at ten o'clock he did the last thing he
should have done under the circumstances. He
telephoned to Baylie, at the office, to go up to
Kelsey Street and get him a suit of clothes.
154


CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THERE IS A CERTAIN INTEREST IN COM-
parisons, and sometimes not a little humour.
Take, for example, that morning, with War-
rington half-crazed in a shabby and not too
clean room at the Hotel Stockton, and then
consider Mr. Furness Brooks, emerging from
his shower to find the buttons in his shirt and his
clothing pressed and ready to his hand. No
frenzied search for his garments; a calm shave,
and an equally calm and fastidious dressing; the
studio room freshly in order, the ash trays
emptied, the fire going, and before it a small
table with coffee bubbling in an electric arrange-
ment, and Miguel at hand with bacon and eggs
and the morning paper.
Rather a painful comparison, too, when one
thinks about it, with neat stacks of wedding
invitations: "Mrs. Thomas Bayne requests the
honour of your presence at the marriage of her
daughter, Anne Hollister, to Mr. Furness
Schuyler Brooks . > ." and so forth. The names
155


TWO FLIGHTS UP
not all of them bearing the closest inspection,
but smart and accepted. He ignored her fretful
protest that she had never heard of them, and
put them all in.
So it happened that he did not glance at the
morning paper for some time. Then, true to his
type, he read the headlines and turned to the
society news, and thus it was not until later that
he saw, halfway down the first page, a head-
line which caught his eye and, having done so,
held it.
BANK LOOT FOUND
Securities from Harrison Bank
Recovered
was what he read.
The article itself was not long. Given only
the initial fact, of the recovery of a suitcase
containing certain missing negotiable bonds
from the Harrison Bank, and the additional
news that they had been found in the apartment
of one James Cox, brother-in-law of Bayne, it
went on to deal with Bayne's record and his
recent pardon. Evidently only the barest state-
ment had been given out by the District At-
torney's office.
He read it again. With the first reading he
had felt only anger and furious annoyance. By
i57


TWO FLIGHTS UP
the Lord Harry, wouldn't the damned story
ever die? And to have it come up again just
now—was there ever such rotten luck? Already
he knew that the breakfast tables and boudoirs
of his world were buzzing with it, and that by
afternoon the society editors would have handed
in their bit, and his approaching marriage to
Tom Bayne's daughter would be duly noted in
the published accounts.
It was only with the second reading that the
true inwardness of the situation occurred to
him. He threw down the paper and leaped to
his feet, overturning his chair.
"Cox!" he thought. "Cox! That's the counter
jumper. The new uncle. He couldn't have known
Bayne. Then how the devil did he get the stuff?"
There was only one conclusion:
They had had the securities all this time, had
them and hidden them. They were as criminal
as Bayne himself; Cox had been no more than
a cat's paw in their ladylike, unscrupulous
hands. It was Margaret and Mrs. Bayne who
were guilty.
He remembered Margaret. He could see her
now, casually opening the front door.
"Oh, did you ring? I thought I heard the
bell," and with a sort of timid archness, taking
him into the drawing room.
158


TWO FLIGHTS UP
"I'm afraid it's cold in here. The furnace*
man is too careless about coal."
He knew by this time that there was no
furnace man, and that the drawing room was
always cold. He knew there was no Hilda. All
their small hypocrisies and snobberies had long
before been uncovered before his discerning,
prominent blue eyes.
But why the poverty if they had had this
hoard to draw upon? He considered that
shrewdly, in view of his knowledge of them.
"Afraid," he concluded. "Holding on until
the old boy got out and told them how to dispose
of it."
To be fair to him, he did not include Holly
in all this. Selfish as were his pre-occupations,
his mind finally drifted to her with a new and
unexpected compassion. "The poor kid!" he
thought, and saw her perhaps getting her first
knowledge through the morning paper. And
with that wave of sympathy he felt stronger,
every inch a man. If he dramatized himself a
bit, it was one fine gesture, to be laid to his
credit.
"I'll stand by her," he thought, and drew
himself up a trifle. "I'm all she has, and I'm not
letting go. The poor kid!"
He had no illusions; he knew what standing
159


TWO- FLIGHTS UP.
by would mean. The men would approve him
for it, but the women would not. And his world
was largely women. It was women who made
out lists, paid calls, gave parties. It was at tea
tables he was popular, not in smoking rooms
after dinners. With much the same gesture with
which he had disposed of the invitations, he
brushed this world of women out of his way.
At the most his business was a casual one.
f He ordered his car brought around from the
public garage where he kept it, and still warm
and exalted with sacrifice, drove to the house
on Kelsey Street.
160


CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
HAVING RETIRED EARLY, MRS. BAYNE
was up before seven o'clock that morning. She
got out of bed in her cold room, lowered the
window, and then put a match to the fire Holly
had laid ready the night before. In front of this
she placed a pitcher of water to warm, and hav-
ing done so, crawled back into bed again.
She felt cheerful and active. The day opened
before her, full of interesting things to be done.
She took her purse from under her pillow and
carefully counted her money. She still had al-
most nine hundred dollars.
She pulled the blankets up around her and
fell to work on a shopping list, but first carefully
she put down a few items, considering them at
length. Twenty-five dollars for the organist at
St. Andrews, ten dollars for the sexton, and a
hundred dollars to the florist, for rented palms
and a few white chrysanthemums. That was a
hundred and thirty-five; from eight hundred
161


TWO FLIGHTS UP
ing bargains here and there, and special sales.
She was contented, quite happy.
Later on she took her bath from the warm
water out of the pitcher, and dressed carefully
to go out. When, hatted and coated, she reached
the chilly dining room, the odour of coffee and
bacon welcomed her.
A little worried frown appeared on Mrs.
Bayne's face as she surveyed Holly when she
brought in the food.
"I hated waking you," she said, "but we have
such a lot to do to-day. You don't look as if you
have had any sleep."
"I slept all right, Mother."
"I wish you'd put on some weight," said her
mother discontentedly. "Really, for a bride to
look as wretched as you do is no compliment to
her husband."
At this, however, she caught Holly's eyes
fixed on her so oddly that she sheered off from
the subject abruptly.
"I wish you'd come downtown with me this
morning."
"I've promised Aunt Margaret to go there."
"For a fitting? I shouldn't think, with clothes
as straight as they are now, you'd need much
fitting." But her mind, preternaturally active
these days, veered to another matter instantly,
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
and she put down her coffee cup. "I do wish
you'd wear rubber gloves, Holly," she said.
"Your hands"
"I can't work in them. I've tried."
"Then you can't work," said Mrs. Bayne.
"We'll have to have Mrs. Carter in sooner or
later. We'd better get her now."
"At three dollars a day? And food?"
"Only for the next month or so. People will
be calling and presents coming, and all that. We
simply can't manage by ourselves."
She went on, cheerfully planning. Holly felt
that ten minutes more of this cheerful babbling
and she would rise up from her chair and
scream. What did it matter whether they had
Mrs. Carter in or not? What did it matter that
her hands were red, and her mother recommend-
ing glycerine and rose water at night to whiten
them? What did anything matter but James
Cox and the trouble they had brought to him?
Only one ray of comfort she had. She had
missed the paper from the vestibule and knew
her mother had taken it. But she had evidently
not seen the news item.
Her mother was going. She got up and drew
on her shabby gloves, gloves without which no
gentlewoman ever passed her front door, ex-
amined her purse for the lists, and so went out.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
Holly accompanied her to the door and kissed
her good-bye, much as she would have kissed an
irresponsible child. During the long watches of
the night, when a strange dog howled from
somewhere apparently close under her windows
and she had listened vainly for that creak on
the stair which would signify Warrington's re-
turn from James Cox's, she had made one
determination: whatever came, her mother was
to have this one day more.
It was not that she so loved her mother.
There were times when she guiltily wondered
if she loved her at all. But passionately she
believed that life had been cruel to her, and that
she had suffered long and unfairly. Although
she did not put it so to herself, much of her
service was a sort of vicarious atonement. Once,
indeed, she had told her feeling about this to
Margaret, but it was after she had been for-
bidden to see James, and Margaret had been
bitter.
"Nonsense!" she had said sharply. "She's had
it easy all her life. She's got it easy now."
Holly was not thinking beyond the day.
She closed the front door and then went up
to her mother's room. There she burned the
newspaper and turned down the bed to air. By
the small travelling clock, it was time for War-
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
be there, to sniff the faint odour of tobacco
smoke which clung about the place, to see his
clothing hanging in the closet, his slippers by
the bed.
On the bureau were laid out his military
brushes and a collar box. Those, and a few
books, were all the mark he had put on the
room. Five minutes, or ten, and he could be
gone—as if he had never been there!
She moved to the bureau and stood fingering
his brushes. She could remember her mother's
bureau in her father's time. When he went
away, his brushes went also, and for a long
time there had been an empty space left where
they had used to lie.
Suddenly she sat down in the chair by the
empty hearth and began to cry, slow, rather
dreadful tears; she cried for her father, for
James and Margaret, for her mother, and even
for herself, as she saw ahead of her long, joy-
less years, if not worse. She and her mother,
and perhaps her father too, shut up in that
dreary house, with little love and no happiness.
Time going on, and she herself drying up and
getting sour, like Aunt Margaret. A succession
of roomers, too; and maybe she would be arch
with them, like Aunt Margaret.
But mostly her grief was for Warrington,
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Hurry, hell!" he stormed, suddenly angry.
"If you think for a minute"
"Oh, go away," she told him wearily. "I'm
not thinking at all. Not about you, anyhow."
She dodged around him and out through the
front door, leaving him speechless and stunned
in the hallway. He recovered enough, however,
to go out onto the steps and to call to her.
"Holly! Come back! Just for a minute."
But she either did not hear him or paid no at-
tention.
Angry and humiliated, his fine gesture re-
pudiated, he went back into the house. He
wanted somebody to talk to, some explanation;
he even wandered as far back as the kitchen,
but there was no one about—nothing but a
starveling dog which snarled at him from be-
neath the kitchen range.
169


CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PHELPS, THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY,
leaned back in his chair. He was moderately
young and not unkindly. True, it was his busi-
ness to administer justice rather than mercy,
and this had hardened him a trifle, as strict
justice often does. A just man is often a hard
man.
But now he was puzzled. The night before
he had been very sure of himself. Bayne, on
his emergence from prison, was to collect the
stolen securities, realize what he could on them,
and decamp. He never had believed Tom Bayne
was a sick man. And there had been too much
of that sort of thing; men went crooked, hid
the profits, took a sentence and came out again
to enjoy them.
"You can figure it this way," he had told his
assistant the day before. "Bayne laid away six
hundred thousand dollars. What he's really
been doing is to stay ten years in the pen, do-
ing easy clerical work at sixty thousand a
year."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"But it isn't true. I've told you the truth."
"Then where is this Warrington?" he de-
manded sternly. "What is he hiding from? Why
did he leave the stuff at the Cox house instead
of taking it to the bank? My dear Miss Bayne,"
he said, leaning forward, "I don't believe you
took that bond. I believe you are protecting—
well, we will say somebody else. And it's no
good. Go home and think it over; you have no
business being mixed up in this."
He rang the bell and there was a movement
among those waiting in the anteroom. She got
up, feeling dizzy and slightly dazed.
"My mother," she said, "I don't want my
mother to know about this. She has heart
trouble, and it would kill her."
"I see. We'll be as easy as we can."
But he was not easy a half-hour or so later,
with two detectives lined up unhappily before
him.
"I don't want any more excuses," he said
angrily. "I want this fellow Warrington, and
no more slips. What the devil do you fellows
think you're doing with him? Playing peek-a-
boo?"
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T W, Q FLIGHTS UP
ing to hear of it, if I live to tell the tale. Says
he sent his clothes out to be pressed and can't
get them back!"
They laughed together, not maliciously.
After Baylie had got his hat and started out,
Miss Sharp remembered something and went
into the outer office, and the detective standing
there, surveying the board, turned at her ap-
proach.
"Mr. Warrington will be in before long," she
told him. "He's just telephoned. He's at the
Hotel Stockton just now. But you'd better wait
here. He'll be around soon."
There was amusement in her face, and he
looked at her shrewdly.
"What's funny, sister? Tell me. I like to
laugh."
"Ask Mr. Warrington when he comes in,"
she said, smiling.
"Tell me now. I can't wait," he coaxed her.
He was her own sort. She had never seen
him before, but in her world, acquaintance and
familiarity were not far apart. She looked
around, saw they were unobserved, and passed
the tale on to him. But he did not laugh. All
at once his comradeship disappeared, and he
pushed her aside with a movement more forcible
than polite.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
They went down together in the elevator, and
out on the pavement another man took up a
position on his other side. He walked between
them, a free man to all appearances, a free man
in a neatly pressed suit, with James's old cap
on his head and his linen exceedingly dirty. But
he was not a free man; he was on his way to
jail.
However, they did not commit him at once.
They took him first to the City Hall, and to the
District Attorney's office. But before that, he
had to wait for some time in the outer room,
where one of the detectives chewed tobacco
morosely, spitting into a large brass cuspidor,
and the other cleaned his nails with his pen-
knife.
At last one of the men took him in. He had
no idea of what he was expected to do or say,
and so he stood still and waited. The detective
had taken off his hat, so he did the same. The
District Attorney was looking at him.
"Come over and sit down, Warrington," he
said. "I want to talk to you. Wait out there,
will you, Lyell?"
The detective went out. Warrington sat down
near the desk. There was a silence, and then
the District Attorney cleared his throat.
"I suppose you know why you're here?"
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"I suppose I do. Yes."
There was another silence. He could feel the
District Attorney's eyes moving over him,
studying, watching.
"How did you get mixed up with this thing,
Warrington? I understand your record's been
clean, so far?"
"That depends on how far you think I am
mixed up in it."
"Don't spar for time," said the District
Attorney, rather more sharply. "We know you
had those bonds. We know you sold one of them.
That was a fool thing to do, in the first place.
Why? Were you trying out the market?"
"I didn't know it was stolen when I offered
it."
"When the Bayne girl asked you to sell it,
you didn't suspect that it was a part of the
Harrison Bank loot?"
"She never gave it to me. She never saw it."
"She says she did."
"Then she's lying."
The District Attorney bent forward.
"Now, see here, Warrington," he said.
"You're in a pretty bad way, and you know it.
We know that you came into possession of those
securities, that you knew they were from the
Harrison Bank and that you hid them in the
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Anything more? What do you mean?"
He saw he had slipped there. The District
Attorney leaned back in his chair and, his legs
thrust out before him, sat surveying him with
his head lowered.
"It won't wash, Warrington," he said.
"Either you or this girl took that bond. It sold,
all right, but you began to get cold feet on the
proposition. Somebody might check it up;
sooner or later it would be checked up, almost
certainly. If that happened before you'd dis-
posed of the rest, there would be a search of the
house, so you tried to get rid of the rest. This
story about taking them back to the bank is all
poppycock. There's another point you've over-
looked, Warrington, and this is it: this inquiry
might have taken a different form if you'd
acted like an honest man. You haven't. You
escaped last night and hid yourself at an ob-
scure hotel; this morning you sent for another
suit of clothes. You wear a hat usually, don't
you? What are you doing with that cap? If we
hadn't landed you, where would you be now?
Making a get-away!"
Suddenly Warrington laughed. There was a
bit of hysteria in the laughter, but he could not
help himself. He got out a not overclean
handkerchief and wiped his eyes.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"And you won't tell about the bond?"
"No."
"Think a minute. If this case ever gets to a
jury, there are two angles to it: either the
Bayne family is involved, as I've told you, or
you are—you and Cox. You knew Cox, and
Cox married Mrs. Bayne's sister. Suppose the
sister talks, and Cox tells you what he knows?
You go there, take a room, and look about, and
finally you locate it. It doesn't look so good, does
it?"
"It looks pretty rotten."
"Well, come clean. Get out if you can."
"It will take some thinking over. I don't care
about myself, but I—I didn't sleep much last
night, and I haven't had any breakfast. I need
food, I guess, and a chance to think."
"I imagine we can provide both of those,"
said the District Attorney cheerfully, and rang
a bell.
184


CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
MRS. BAYNE HAD HAD A WONDERFUL
morning. Nothing was too fine for her; she
wanted only the best.
"Haven't you a better quality?" she would
demand, in quite her old-time manner, and out
would come boxes and wrappings; and out of
those, again, wonderful things: stockings and
handkerchiefs, underwear and linen.
But she did not buy Holly's household linens
at Steinfeldt and Roder's. Not since Margaret's
marriage had she been in that store.
By noon she was very tired. She went up to
the restaurant and ordered herself a frugal
luncheon, and while waiting for it, she listed
her expenditures so far. She had done extremely
well, she reflected. True, Holly would not have
so many of each sort of thing—she herself had
had two dozen of everything when she had
married—but what Holly had was very good.
Mrs. Bayne was in high good humour, and
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
when the head waiter remembered her and came
to speak to her, it was like old times indeed.
"Glad to see you here again, Mrs. Bayne.
You don't honour us any more."
And she acknowledged this tribute with a
gracious condescension.
"I seldom lunch downtown any more," she
said. "But I always find it pleasant here."
She had ordered a New England boiled din-
ner, because it was ready and cheap. The cab-
bage she knew gave her indigestion; but she was
above indigestion that day. She was hungry;
she ate heartily, and after luncheon she made
some more purchases, looking wistfully at a
gray gown with a chinchilla collar for herself
for the wedding, and then passing it by. There
may have been a moment when she thought of
those other bonds, lying where they had lain
for years and doing nobody any good, but she
put the temptation away from her. And what
she called Holly's money was not to be spent for
herself. Not one cent.
But the indigestion began to bother her. She
went to the soda fountain and got some baking
soda, and then took a taxi home. The floor was
piled with her packages; a boy had to carry them
out for her. But she could not wait for their de-
livery. She wanted to get home, and spread
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TWO FLIGHTS UP,
them out on her bed and gloat over them, like
old times.
Like old times.
She took out the money for her taxi fare, and
then carefully closed her bag. After a time she
dozed off comfortably.
At the house Holly had mechanically finished
Jier belated morning work and was anxiously
Watching for her mother.
Holly had worked hard, for she did not want
to think—not just yet, anyhow. She had told
her story, and they had not believed her. She
was free as air. But Howard Warrington was
under suspicion. She was free, and they were
after him, who had done nothing, known nothing.
Beyond that, her mind at first refused to
travel. She felt helpless and resentful, and that
was all.
It was noon before she sat down and began
really to think; and then her thinking got her
nowhere. Some memory of Furness that morn-
ing came back, and she wondered if she had
driven him away for good. The thought left her
entirely indifferent, save for her inner knowl-
edge that, for the first time since she had known
him, she had been absolutely honest with him
then.
"Honest for once!" she thought. "All along
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
I've been acting and lying. It's been wrong. It's
been immoral."
But wasn't there a fundamental immorality
in the whole situation? Not only the bond. That
had been an accident, a temptation in a weak
moment. But all the rest of it, their pretense at
gentility, their snobberies and hypocrisies; how
about them?
She was through with them. If, after it all
came out, she told Furness how she felt about
him and he still wanted to marry her, she would.
But she would tell him first.
And it was out of that conclusion, slowly and
painfully reached, that she came to another. She
would marry him, but first her mother would
have to clear things up. She would have to tell
the police about the bond.
It would not be so terrible, after all. They
would not arrest her mother any more than they
had arrested her. One could go to the District
Attorney and tell him the truth, and so long as
there was no conspiracy, and the money was
returned, there would be no punishment. She
knew that now.
She made a bargain with herself: if her
mother would clear Howard, she would pay the
price. She would marry Furness if he still
wanted her.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
She went down the stairs when she heard the
front door open, and found Mrs. Bayne in the
lower hall, her arms filled with bundles and her
face radiant.
"Oh, my dear," she said. "Such a morning!
I'm so tired I could drop."
She dropped her parcels on the hall table and
sat down, a trifle breathlessly.
"As soon as I can walk, we'll go up and open
these things," she went on. "I bought a new
rug for the vestibule. The old one was dread-
ful."
"Have you had anything to eat?" There was
a new gentleness in the girl's voice. To see all
this happiness and to know one was going to kill
it—it was cruel.
"I lunched downtown, and I ate cabbage.
Stupid of me, but I like it, and one can't cook
it in the house. It smells so. I think I'll take a
little more baking soda."
She felt around in her lap, preparatory to
rising, then, still sitting, she glanced about her
on the floor.
"What is it you are looking for, Mother?"
Holly asked.
"My purse," replied Mrs. Bayne. "It's here
somewhere. I've dropped it."
But it was not there. Nor was it in the hall,
189


CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
JAMES STILL SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM.
The events of the day and Warrington's visit
that evening had left him benumbed. The very
futility of anger left him weaponless. He was
ready to shake his fist at the world, but the
world was callous to the shaking of fists. It
recognized only effective action—and he could
not act.
For the first time since his marriage he did
not go to bed when Margaret did. He was not
sensual, but for a long time he had been very
lonely. The sense of her bodily nearness in the
double bed had been happiness; the longing of
his solitary soul for companionship was par-
tially eased by the contact with her not beautiful
but warm and alive human body.
Something of this he must have felt in ad-
vance, when they were buying their furniture.
"No twin beds for me, Al," he said to the
salesman. "I'm old-fashioned. My father and
mother used the same bed for thirty years—
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
and settled many a squabble in it, like as not.
Anyhow, that's what we're going to have."
And Margaret had blushed and agreed.
But that night he was alone, marooned by mis-
ery, cut off from her by despair and suspicion.
"Won't you come to bed, James? You need
to sleep and forget things for a while."
"Not now," he said, and looked at her with
eyes at once hard and hurt.
"I could warm some milk. If you have some-
thing in your stomach, it will make you sleepy."
He shook his head obstinately. "I don't want
to sleep," he protested vehemently. "I've got to
think. I've got to think this thing out."
He could not get into the same bed with her,
with that suspicion between them. And he dis-
trusted himself. He felt that, if he did, he would
somehow weaken. He would not be able to think
clearly. He would even be sorry for her.
She was suffering; he knew that. All her new
vitality had been drained from her. She might
have been the Margaret of six months ago. He
was afraid to look at her hands, so sure he was
that she had clenched the left one.
"You go to bed," he told her roughly. "I'll
come in later."
He heard her moving about, undressing, the
slow sound of the brush over her hair, the two
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
small knocks of her bedroom slippers on the
floor, and the soft rustle as she got into the bed.
He wanted to go in, to kneel beside her and put
his head down and be comforted.
But how could he?
She was keeping something from him, some-
thing that she and Warrington both knew.
At two o'clock in the morning he took off
his shoes and tiptoed into the bedroom. Mar-
garet was wide awake and stirred as he entered,
but he only took an extra quilt from the top of
the closet and went out again. When, toward
daylight, she crept to the living-room door, he
was asleep on the davenport, fully dressed but
for his shoes and coat.
Things were no better between them in the
morning. He shaved while she got the break-
fast, but before he ate, he went down and
bought a morning paper, and she found him in
the living room with the paper on the floor, and
what was left of his world in ruins.
"Your breakfast's ready, James," said Mar-
garet quietly.
"I don't want any breakfast."
Her look was piteous, but he did not see it.
"You can't work all day without food."
Then he turned on her.
"Work!" he said. "Do you suppose I can go
i93


t;w o flights up,
to the store after that?" He pointed to the paper,
then picked it up and thrust it at her savagely.
"Read it," he said. "Look what you've done
to me. Read it and smile!"
"I! You know better than that."
"Oh, I do, do I? You knew what was in that
bag. You arranged to have it brought here.
I'm no fool. You lied last night. Look here, have
you and your precious family been living off
that stuff all this time? That's what I want to
know, and, by God, I'm going to know it."
"If you can think that," said Margaret, "you
can think anything." And she left the room.
She heard him go out soon after, not slam-
ming the door, but going quietly, as though'
ashamed of his recent violence. She moved
about, automatically doing her usual morning
work, but inwardly in a turmoil. It couldn't go
on. It must not go on. As between James and
Annie, it must be James.
She would have to tell him, and let him make
such use of it as he would.
The decision gave her courage. She took off
her morning dress and put on her street clothes.
While she dressed, she listened, but there was
no sound of his latchkey in the lock, none of
that preliminary clearing of the throat which
always preceded his entrance. Waiting for him,
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
with the habit of years she picked up her sew-
ing basket; but when she saw the fragment of
Holly's wedding gown, she put it down again.
For the first time she saw all the destruction
that would follow her confession to James—
that it involved Holly's future too.
Unlike Holly, her experience of the day be-
fore had left her in terror of the law. Out of
her ignorance she drew a picture of her sister in
prison. It would kill her; she would never live
through the trial.
Her imagination leaped on. She saw Mrs.
Bayne gone, and Holly's engagement broken.
She saw the shabby old house, and only Tom
Bayne and Holly in it. Time going on, and Tom
Bayne creeping about, a sick man, a friendless
man—and Holly's youth going, gone, like her
own. "I can't do it," she told herself. But she
knew she would do it.
By noon she had worked herself into a state
of frenzy, and then the telephone rang. She was
so certain it was James that her heart leaped;
but the call was from Simmons's grocery store
on Kelsey Street.
"We have a message for you, Mrs. Cox,"
said Simmons himself. "Your sister ain't so
well, and Miss Holly would like you to come
right up."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"Who's downstairs?" she asked once. "Some-
one keeps going out and coming in."
"It's Aunt Margaret. She's been telephoning
the taxi company again."
"It hasn't been found?"
"Not yet, but the men don't report until six
o'clock. Even if they don't find it, what do we
care?" She came to the side of the bed and
touched her mother's forehead. "We've still got
each other," she said shakily.
"Has Furness been in?"
"No. I didn't expect him to-day. Now close
your eyes and see if you can't sleep again."
Toward evening she really fell asleep.
The firelight flickered in the darkened room,
making it soothingly warm and restful; her pil-
lows in their fresh slips were smooth and soft.
Tragedy, grim and heartbreaking, was reigning
downstairs, but in her sheltered bed, her firelit
room, Mrs. Bayne went peacefully to sleep.
Holly went down the stairs.
Margaret was in the drawing room. There
was no fire there, and under the hard top light
of the chandelier her face looked drawn and
old. Each time she had gone to the grocery
store she had called up the flat, only to be told
that her number did not answer, and unreason-
ing terror began to possess her.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
Margaret said nothing.
At six o'clock Holly boiled some eggs and
made toast, and they ate, the two of them, in
the kitchen, because it was warm. While she
was preparing the meal, Margaret went out
once more to telephone, but Holly had no need
to ask the result.
Margaret sat stiff and silent at the kitchen
table, busy with her own thoughts, and Holly
said very little. Once she asked Margaret a
question, but the answer to it was vague and
faintly hostile.
"Do you think Father told her the day she
went to see him?"
"I haven't an idea. He might. He put it
there."
Holly sat with her chin in her hands and
gazed at her.
"Still, I would like to think he did," she per-
sisted. "That he told her, so she could send it
back. Wouldn't you?"
"Don't fool yourself. If he told her at all, it
wasn't for that."
Holly made an impatient gesture.
"There are still some decent motives in the
world, you know, and some honest people."
"There are," said Margaret, rising. "There is
my James. And look what it's brought him to!"
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
She put down her cup and went upstairs, and
soon afterward she came down with her wraps
on.
"I'm going now," she said heavily. "She's
still sleeping, and her colour is good. But I
don't quite like leaving you alone with her."
"I'll be all right. And I'll not be alone in the
house. Mr. Warrington will be here."
Had Margaret been less absorbed in her own
troubles, she would have seen Holly's sensitive
colour rise.
Holly saw her to the door and kissed her
good-bye, but Margaret was still frozen. There
was a sag to her shoulders that had been absent
now for months. It was as though she was
afraid to go home. Holly closed the door and
went in, shivering.
She and the dog were alone. She got a coat
from the hall closet and spread it over the two
of them on the sofa. She knew Warrington
had brought the dog. It was his dog. She pulled
it closer to her and tucked the coat in around it.
She was waiting for Warrington. Now and
then she looked at the clock. She knew he was
all right. When she had reached the house that
morning, a dapper-looking young man had been
waiting on the doorstep, and had told her with
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
a twinkle in his eyes that he had called for a
suit of clothes.
He explained, not much, but that Warring-
ton had torn something and needed other
clothes.
"But he is all right?" she had asked. The
young man had laughed cheerfully, with the
air of one who has a secret and merry joke.
"Sure, he's all right," he said, "except for
a little wear and tear." And he had gone up the
stairs chuckling.
So now Holly was waiting. Soon he would
come and tell her what to do, and she would do
it. An anchor, he had said; but he was to be
more than that: he was to be steersman, quiet
and strong and resourceful, to pilot her out of
these troubled waters.
The clock moved on. Nine, ten, eleven, and
still he did not come. At midnight she put the
dog to bed and went up the stairs. Her mother
was still sleeping. She sat down by the fire; and
confused with thinking, the warmth wrapping
her like a blanket, she too finally slept.
At half-past one that morning Mrs. Bayne
awakened. She felt completely rested and re-
freshed. She sat up in bed and took another sip
of water, and then made out Holly's quiet figure
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
back again. A little bit of coquetry revived in
her; she wondered if she had changed very
much. Her former fastidious distaste of having
him back was softened. They would have to be
kind to him, she and Holly. But Holly would
not be there; she was going to be married.
She rose after a while and got her nail file
and a clean handkerchief from her dresser.
She had a dislike of soiling her fingers. Then
from the mantelpiece she cautiously took down a
candle, and, lighting it, went into the passage.
Holly had not moved.
As Mrs. Bayne mounted the stairs, she felt
dizzy and weak; her knees shook, and the candle
wavered, but she went on and up, with a faint
smile on her face. Up and up. Past Mr. War-
rington's door, carefully, carefully; the attic
steps now, and a strong draught from some
open window, almost blowing out the candle.
And then the top of the stairs and the end of all
worry. And treasure trove.
She placed the candle on the top of a pack-
ing box and set to work. The trunk had to be
moved, and it would not do to drag it along the
floor; she inched it over, lifting it first at one
end and then at the other; a dozen, two dozen
efforts, each of which made her dizzy and more
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
odour of unwashed human bodies, poor sanitary
arrangements, carbolic acid, and dead cigar
ends.
He sat down on his bench" bed and lighted
a cigarette, and almost immediately men all
about him began to beg for tobacco. He tossed
a half-dozen or so across the passage, but one
of them fell short, and there ensued a struggle
between two Negroes to reach it. There was no
humour in their efforts, but grim and desperate
resolution; they stretched and panted, grunted
and cursed, and on this strange contest a dozen
other men gazed, their faces pressed against the
bars.
Toward night he began to suffer from
claustrophobia; in the dim light the cell seemed
to be closing in on him, and the air to be heavy
and unbreathable; he was covered with cold
sweat. But he knew the claustrophobia was
only a reflex of his own mental condition, his
inner conviction that he was trapped and done
for. Men did not suffer this ignominy to have
it forgotten. They went on through life, marked
men, shamed men. Guilt was news; but exonera-
tion was buried in the back pages.
And who was there to exonerate him? Mrs.
Bayne. Suppose he broke his promise to Holly
and told them that? How could he prove it? And
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TWO FLIGHTS UP.
Warrington leaped to his feet.
"Dead!" he cried/ "Dead! Good God!" He
swayed as he held to the back of his chair.
"Well, that's that," he said unsteadily.
"So it does make a difference?"
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know. I
guess it ends it; that's all."
"Ends what?"
He made no reply. Hope was dead in him;
there would be no confession now from Mrs.
Bayne, no anything. If he claimed now that
it was the dead woman who had given him the
bond, they would laugh at him. Even Holly
could not swear to that; she had only his word
for it
.
Holly! He steadied himself.
"I suppose I couldn't go up there?" he asked,
after what seemed a long time. "You see, I've
been like part of the family, in a way. I wouldn't
like her—like them—to think I'm not—inter-
ested."
"And incidentally to find out where you are,
eh? Maybe to see Cox"
"Oh, damn Cox!" he shouted suddenly.
"What do I care about Cox? I don't care if
I never see him again. I've got a right to go,
haven't I? Look at me! I haven't seen a razor
for two days. I need linen. I don't suppose
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
you'll lock me up indefinitely without any
clothes, will you?"
He looked disreputable, tortured. His absurd
anticlimax was an appeal, shouted in furious
tones.
"We don't want any more tricks, Warring-
ton."
"You let me go up there. After that you can
boil me in oil, if you like."
They let him go. Watching him, Phelps was
certain that the death of Mrs. Bayne marked
some sort of crisis in the affair, but what that
crisis might be, he had no idea.
"You talk it over with the daughter," he
said. "If she's ready to swear on her oath that
she gave you that bond to sell, and the suitcase
later on, she can clear you. If she can't or won't
do those things"
"She never saw the bond. I've told you that."
211


CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
TIMES, LIKE THE STRUCTURE OF
society, change; and neighbourhoods alter also.
Holly could still remember her mother's horror
when Simmons's grocery was established at the
corner, and also that day, a year ago now,
when the McCook family moved in at Ninety,
across the street from the Bayne house, and at
once advertised for boarders.
Mrs. Bayne from that time on had behaved
precisely as though Number Ninety had been
eliminated from Kelsey Street. She still recog-
nized Eighty-eight and Ninety-two, but there
was, according to her view, no Ninety at all.
But Ninety, after the manner of such affairs,
was extremely cognizant of Ninety-one.
"Stuck up things!" said Mrs. McCook. "Be-
lieve me, Clara, I'm sorry for them. They're
that poor and dirty proud. Putting on all those
airs, and like as not nothing to eat in the house."
But although she might pity and scorn them,
her interest in them grew rather than abated.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
Especially was this the case after she had
learned their story at the grocery store. The
first visit or so of Furness Brooks she observed
carefully, and one day she confided to Clara
that:
"The girl over at Ninety-one has a fellow.
Not much to look at, either."
"He's got a car," said Clara, as though that
answered the objection.
At seven-thirty in the morning it was Mrs.
McCook's custom to take a broom and, step-
ping out of her front door, from there to
survey her world. Not that it varied from day
to day. At such and such a time Mr. William-
son would leave Number Eighty-seven, the
morning paper tucked in his overcoat pocket,
and start out on his campaign to see that
widows and orphans were not left penniless,
but were adequately protected by life insur-
ance. At such and such a time would the
Moriarity boy run to Simmons's grocery for
the bread his shiftless mother had forgotten
the day before Bright and early, too, her
basket on her arm, Mrs. Kahn, at Ninety-five,
would start for the Kosher butcher shop in the
next block; and the front door of the Bayne
house would open, and Holly, looking neither
here nor there, would brush off the front steps.
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
"I don't think it would ever occur to her,"
said Holly, with slightly heightened colour, and
let it go at that.
On the same night, then, that James Cox had
tried to drown his misery in bad bootleg liquor,
at about two o'clock, the McCook doorbell rang
and Mrs. McCook sat up in bed and prodded
her husband.
"There's the telegram, Joe," she said.
Her sister was expecting her first confine-
ment, and Mrs. McCook had been on pins and
needles, as she said to Clara, for the last week.
But Joe was heavily asleep, and at last she
herself got out of bed and in her nightgown
went down the stairs. At first when she opened
the door she saw nobody; then, looking down,
she discovered a figure crouching on the door-
step.
"For mercy's sake!" she said, peering down,
'Who is it?"
The figure stirred and rose.
"It's Holly Bayne," it said in a lifeless voice.
"Have you a telephone? The grocery's closed."
"What's the matter? Who's sick?"
"It's my mother. I think—I think she's dead."
"Most likely she's just fainted," said Mrs.
McCook reassuringly. "You wait a minute, and
IH come right over."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
McCook said gently. "I'll get Joe over, and you
leave the rest to me."
"Is she"
"I'm afraid so, honey."
Holly sat once more in the chair by the dying
fire. It did not matter to her that heavy foot-
steps passed the door, that in that hour strangers
were moving about the house and she herself
was alone. Nothing mattered but the incredible
fact that her mother was dead, and that she
herself had killed her.
It was the shock that had done it—the dis-
covery that the suitcase was gone. A little care,
and she need never have had that shock. Some
other way, any other way than the one she had
taken, and she might have saved her.
The heavy footsteps were coming down the
attic stairs again. They stopped on the third
floor, and she knew they were laying her in
Margaret's room. After a time the door opened
and Mrs. McCook came in. She turned on the
lights and mended the fire, and then smoothed
back the bed.
"You better come and crawl right in here,
honey," she said. "Joe's attending to things.
We're not going home."
"Not there," said Holly, and shuddered. "I'll
get dressed."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
how. But if the moment you get into trouble
you want to get rid of me, what on earth are
you going to do when you're married to me?"
The unconscious humour of that escaped
them both.
"What?"
"I don't think," she said painfully, "that I'm
going to marry you, Furness."
"What?"
"I don't think I can. I've tried. I can't go
through with it."
"Look here," he said. "You're hysterical. You
don't know what you're saying. Let's wait for
a day or two, until all this is over."
"I know perfectly well what I'm saying. I
hate it, but I must."
"But—the thing's announced! It's—it's as
good as done."
"Oh, no, it isn't. I don't like to do it, Furness.
She wanted it, and—I would like to do it for her.
But there's somebody else."
He was stupefied, hit in his weakest part—
his vanity.
"Somebody else! That's not true, and you
know it. Why, you don't know anybody else."
But her eyes met his honestly and fearlessly.
"I've told you,' she said. "There is somebody
else."
220


CHAPTER THIRTY
IT WAS A PORTION OF THE DECORUM OF
death, to Mrs. McCook, like drawn windows
and a closed piano, that doorbells must not be
rung. Attired in her best black, therefore, she
lurked in the lower hall, and any arrivals found
the door mysteriously and slowly opening be-
fore them, while she herself remained behind it
out of sight.
In this manner she admitted Warrington and
the detective; but once inside, she recognized
the former and condescended to mournful
speech.
"Terrible, isn't it?" she said. "I guess Miss
Bayne will be glad to see you. It's a pity you
weren't here last night."
"Was she alone?"
"Yes. The mother had been sick all day, and
about two in the morning, while the poor girl
was asleep, she took a notion to go up to the
attic. Of all places! And Miss Bayne found her
there, dead."
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
name. I suppose you didn't mean any harm, but
God protect us from the blundering fools who
wreck us and didn't mean to."
She went out of the room, leaving him there,
and he heard her go along the back passage.
There followed the opening and closing of the
door, and he knew that she had locked herself
away from him.
He squared his shoulders and went out into
the hall. The detective was at the foot of the
stairs, and with a gesture Warrington signalled
that he was going on up. As he climbed, he
heard the officer's heavy deliberate tread be-
hind him. It irritated nerves already strained
to the utmost, and the search he made of War-
rington's room for a possible concealed weapon
drove him almost to frenzy.
"Oh, get the hell out of here and let me clean
up!" he said. "I don't own a gun, and I'm not
going to jump out of a window."
Nevertheless, the detective stood by until he
had seen him go into the bathroom and turn on
the shower. Then he very deliberately locked
him in, put the key in his pocket and started on
certain investigations.
He found the attic staircase without diffi-
culty and climbed it with a certain caution; and
once up, he stood in the semi-obscurity of the
225


TWO FLIGHTS UP
won't disturb her," said Phelps dryly. "You've
made a statement. How do you propose to sup-
port it?"
"I'm telling you. She took it. I knew it all
along. My wife lied to me when she said it was
the girl."
"How do you know that?"
"How does any man know when his wife is
lying to him? They thought I didn't notice it,
but I did. It was night before last, when the
fellow who rooms there came in to see what all
the trouble was about. My wife told me it was
the girl who had found the suitcase and sold the
bond, and he didn't like that. He knew better. I
saw him look at her."
"Why did your wife tell you that?"
"I figure she knew, if it was the mother, I'd
use that information."
"So you claim they were all protecting Mrs.
Bayne?"
"That's about the size of it."
"But why has Warrington kept his mouth
shut, if that's the case?"
James looked up, candidly.
"I suppose because he's a gentleman. That's
what I meant before."
"Where do you get that idea?" Phelps asked
shrewdly. "From your wife?" And when
233


TWO FLIGHTS UP
James made no reply: "How long have you
known this Warrington?"
"Never saw him but once before. He brought
me a message from my wife. She wasn't my
wife then."
"Do you remember that date?"
"I do," said James sturdily. "If I'm wrong,
you'll find it on record at the station house in
Number Three precinct. I hit a policeman that
night."
The District Attorney sat at his desk for
some time after James had gone out. Then he
got his hat and coat, and on his way out he
stopped in to see the chief of detectives.
"I've got something I'd like done to-night, if
possible," he told him. "Tom Bayne is dying,
and I'd like somebody to go to the pen and get a
deposition from him. I want to know when his
wife visited him last, and if he told her about the
suitcase."
The chief smiled.
"Sure," he said. "I'll send Lyell. But he told
her, all right; I can tell you that now."
He opened the desk drawer and carefully
brought out two small objects which he laid on
the blotter.
"Exhibits A and B," he said genially. "Lyell
took Warrington up this morning and learned
234


TWO FLIGHTS UP
it as using it as a musical accompaniment to a
book he was reading, the telephone rang, and he
yawned and answered it. It was Lyell on long
distance. Tom Bayne was dead. He had passed
away comfortably an hour or so ago, but be-
fore he had done so, he had made his statement.
"Looks like we've been barking up the wrong
tree," was Lyell's comment.
"Yeah," said Mr. Phelps, yawning, and hung
up the receiver.
He went back to his book and the radio, which
was now singing, "Oh, Promise Me" in a
throaty soprano. But before he settled down,
he took an old envelope out of his pocket and
wrote two words on it as a reminder for the
next day.
"Cox—Warrington."
236


CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
HOWARD WARRINGTON WAS RELEASED
the next day. There were neither apologies nor
explanations. Simply the closed hand of the law
opened and released him. He was free.
For all the change that the last forty-eight
hours had made on the surface, they might
never have been. The office greeted him with
grins and cheerful badinage. Outside of that, so
little had he counted there, his absence had been
scarcely noted.
"I'm just reporting," he told Miss Sharp. "I
can't stay. There's been a death in the family
where I live."
"I thought you looked kinda shot," said that
young woman. "You just go along. I'll fix it."
But as he started out she called him back.
"Say, Mr. Baylie's got that suit of yours. Do
you want to take it along?"
"I'll get it to-morrow," he told her, and made
his escape. . . .
So it happened that Warrington and James
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TWO FLIGHTS UP
looking thin and white, without wanting to take
her in his arms. And he would not do that; he
would not drag her once more into poverty. She
had had enough of that, and of the things it
sometimes led to. She was comfortable now. Let
her alone.
Certainly she was comfortable. With the
coming of James and Margaret to live in the
old house, it began to take on a new if slightly
vulgar vitality. The furnace roared under
James's mighty wielding of the shovel; lights
blazed; and Warrington, putting his key into
the lock, would be met sometimes by the smell
of frying onions, and on passing the drawing-
room door would find James there, in Mrs.
Bayne's old chair, his feet on what had been the
tea table, and a cigar in his mouth.
"Come in, Howard!" he would call genially.
"Come in and make yourself at home. Shove
that dog off, there. He's too fat and lazy to
move."
James secretly adored the dog.
Warrington went in sometimes. If Holly
was not there, he would even stay a little, lis-
tening to James talk and even putting in a word
now and then himself. But occasionally Holly
would be there, very quiet and very conscious
of him, and then he would take himself in hand
239


TWO FLIGHTS UP
and resolutely go upstairs. If James ever noticed
this, he made no comment.
James was very happy. He was enormously
proud, of his wife, of Holly, and especially of
the house. He would take the dog out for walks,
and using that as an excuse, stand on the pave-
ment and survey the building complacently, feet
apart and head held high.
Once Mrs. McCook found him on her side of
the street, looking across.
"Guess I'll have to paint those shutters this
spring," he said. "Too good a house to let go."
"It's a very handsome house," said Mrs.
McCook—and won him completely.
He was constantly picking up bargains at the
store and sending them home. And at last there
arae a truly great day, when he sent up a player-
piano—twenty-five dollars a month on the in-
stallment plan. It came on Margaret's birth-
day, and he kept her downtown that afternoon.
When she came in, she went directly upstairs,
and the first she knew of it was when the strains
of some popular air arose to her overhead.
"Mercy!" she said to Holly. "Who on earth
ever let that hurdygurdy into the house?"
After that, James spent a great deal of his
leisure time at the piano, with a cigar in his
240


TWO FLIGHTS U T.
"Maybe he doesn't want me to," said Holly,
her face scarlet.
Suddenly Margaret got up. "I think," she
said, "if you are ready for your coffee"
But nobody else moved. James sat com-
placently back in his chair, and Warrington
faced Mr. Steinfeldt, his hand closing over
Holly's as he spoke.
"That's not the question, Holly," he said
steadily. "It it's a question of wanting "He
released her hand again and addressed Mr.
Steinfeldt. "I hadn't expected the thing to be
brought up like this," he said, "but since it
has"
Mr. Steinfeldt beamed.
"Since it has, we might as well go through
with it. Holly here knows I—care for her. I
always have, since I've known her. I always
will. There can never be anybody else. But I'm
not in a position to marry, and I don't know
when I will be. She can do better, and I think
she should."
Mr. Steinfeldt looked at Margaret, standing
outraged and disapproving at the end of the
table.
"Sit down, Mrs. Cox," he said. "Why hurry
and spoil a good meal? I might get indigestion
and forget what I came to say."
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

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