She said, “I suppose you know what caused me to leave.”

  “Sid Jannix?”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me about him first.”

  She said, “I was a little fool when I was a kid. I always had a savage streak in me. I liked fighting and fighters. I never cared much for baseball games, but loved football. Sidney was in school with me. He was on the football team. Then the school took up boxing, and Sidney was the best in our school. He became something of a hero. The boxing died out because there was too much parental opposition, but Sidney was the idol of every boy in school. And I guess he became the school bully. I didn’t realize it at the time. It was our last year in high school.

  “Well, I kept up with Sidney, and my family didn’t like rt. Sidney took up professional fighting, and adopted the attitude that he was something of a martyr, and I— Well, when Sidney was making enough to support me, I ran away with him and we were married.” She shrugged wearily, then added, “Of course it was a ghastly, terrible mistake.”

  She paused for a minute as though trying to find some way of detouring what lay ahead, then she plunged once more into the recital.

  “We lived together for just about three months. The first two or three weeks I was completely hypnotized. And then, little by little, I began seeing him as he really was. He was a bully, and he was yellow. When he could handle anyone, he was ruthless in handing out punishment. When he couldn’t, he was full of alibis. He got good enough to get almost to the top, and then, as he began to meet the better men—however, that’s getting ahead of my story. At the time I married him, he was just coming up from the preliminary fighters, and beginning to attract attention. It went terribly to his head. He was emotional, intensely jealous. He began to treat me as though I were just so much personal property. I could have stood all that if it hadn’t been for the little things—little places where the veneer scraped off, and I could see what was underneath.”

  “You don’t need to go into all that,” I said. “Just tell me what happened after you left him.”

  “I’d had some business training in school. I got a job. I kept trying to perfect my secretarial work, and I had the satisfaction of knowing I was succeeding. I kept working up.”

  “No divorce?”

  “I thought Sid had got a divorce. That was the meanest trick he played on me. I told him I wanted to be free. He said that it would be better to wait for a year and get a divorce on the ground of desertion. He didn’t want to have a lot of allegations of cruelty in the record. He said it would hurt his career.

  “We started out to wait for that year to elapse. It was a big year for Sidney. He came a long way up for about seven or eight months of that year, and then he went all the way down in three months. I don’t know all that happened, but his manager came to the conclusion he was yellow. He’d been a terror in the ring with the men he could master, but—oh, I don’t know. It’s a long story, and I think he did some crooked work—sold out his manager and threw a fight or something. I don’t know enough of what happened to talk about it. I just heard rumors, but, anyway, about ten months from the date of our separation, he came to me. He was desperate then. He said that he’d never been able to get a grip on himself after I’d left. He said I’d taken the inspiration out of his life.”

  “That was after ten months?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice was bitter. “All the time he was going up, he was very patronizing toward-me; but when the bottom fell out, he started begging for sympathy. Well, anyway, he told me that he was the sort of man who needed some woman to be his inspiration, that he knew he could never get me to come back, that he had met another girl, that he could never feel toward her as he felt toward me, but that she was desperately in love with him, and he sort of liked her.” She laughed bitterly. “That was Sidney all over. She loved him desperately, and he sort of liked her.”

  “And what did he want?” I asked.

  “He wanted to go to Reno and get a divorce.”

  “And suggested that you pay for it?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Why didn’t you?” -

  “I did,” she said. “And he told me the divorce went through.”

  “And the girl?”

  “He married her. That’s why I didn’t bother to check the divorce records.”

  “And he hadn’t got the divorce?”

  “No. As it turned out, he’d simply taken the money I’d given him to make an impression on this other girl. He got her to marry him. She had some money saved. Sidney got that.”

  “That wasn’t Helen Framley?” I asked.

  “No. Her name was Sadie something. I’ve forgotten the last name, but I remember he kept talking about Sadie, and I was curious as to what sort of a girl she was.”

  “All right. Then what happened?”

  “Absolutely nothing for years. I had entirely lost track of him, and I hardly ever even thought of him. He quit his ring career. I think the Boxing Commission had some evidence on him that made it impossible for him to fight again. I don’t think he wanted to, anyway. He wasn’t the type to stand up under punishment in a ring.”

  “And you met Philip?”

  “Yes. I’d taken the name of Corla Burke so I could wipe out the past and begin all over. You see, my father—”

  “I understand about the name now,” I said. “Let’s go on from there.”

  “At first, I—”

  “You don’t need to go into that. Just come to the Helen Framley part.”

  “I got this very queer letter from Helen Framley. She said that she had read in the paper I was planning to get married almost immediately, that she was friendly with Sidney, and had heard Sidney speak of me, that she wondered if I knew Sidney had never got a divorce. She went on to say that Sidney was very much changed from what he was when I had known him, that he had steadied down a lot and really wanted to make something of himself in the world. She didn’t think he had the money to get a divorce right away, but if I didn’t want to wait, she could fix things up so that I could go ahead with the marriage, and after I had married Philip, Sidney would go ahead and get a divorce. She said he’d had some bad luck, but within a few weeks he’d be in the money again. I could then pretend to my husband there had been some irregularity in stating my age or something of that sort in the license, and get him to marry me all over again, or just keep on living with him and it would be a common-law marriage.”

  “ ‘Queer’ is right. How much money did he want?” I asked.

  “She didn’t even mention anything like that. Not as coming from me. She simply said that she thought that if he could get enough to set himself up in some business, it would be all he’d want, and I’d never hear from him again.”

  “Did you gather the impression that she was writing you at his request?”

  “No. She told me that he didn’t know anything about the letter she was writing, that he was intending to write to Philip Whitewell if it appeared that the marriage was going through, that he didn’t want Philip to be placed in the position of making a bigamous marriage.”

  “Very considerate about Philip, wasn’t he?”

  “Well—oh, it was about what you’d expect of Sidney. This Miss Framley seemed very nice. She looked at it from my viewpoint.”

  “How had she found out you were really Sidney’s wife? How had she found you under the name of Corla Burke?”

  “She didn’t say—just wrote this brief letter.”

  “I see. Now when the proposition was all boiled down, unless you promised Sidney Jannix enough money to start up in business, he was going to prevent your marriage. If you’d promise to take care of him from money you could get from your husband, he was going to sit back and let you become the goose that would lay his golden eggs.”

  “Well, if you want to look at it that way.”

  “It’s the only way to look at it.”

  “Then you think this Helen Framley was—”

  “I don’t think Helen Framley ever wrote the letter.”

  “But she told me to reply to her.”

  “And you did?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And that was the letter that Arthur Whitewell dictated?”

  “He didn’t dictate it.”

  -

  “But he knew about what was in it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to know about that,” I said.

  “Well, I had it coming to me. I deserved everything I got. I don’t suppose I can ever explain it to you. I could never explain it to anyone, not even myself. But—well, I just had crossed those three months when I had been married to Sidney Jannix out of my life. I wrote them off as a bad experience, and—”

  “By that you mean you didn’t tell Philip anything about them?”

  She nodded.

  “And Philip knew nothing whatever about Sidney Jan-nix or about your having been married?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So this letter from Helen Framley dropped on you like a one-ton bomb making a direct hit?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I took the letter and went to see Philip.”

  “Where?”

  “At his office. We had a date for that night.”

  “But you didn’t see Philip?”

  “No. He’d been called out on a deal that was very important, and he left a note telling me he was awfully sorry but he just had to ask me to forget about the evening, that he’d been trying to reach me on the telephone, and couldn’t. He said he’d give me a ring around eleven o’clock and see if I could have lunch with him the next day.”

  “Arthur Whitewell was in the office?” I asked.

  -“Yes.”

  “And knew from the look on your face that something was wrong?”

  “No. I don’t think so. He was considerate and very nice. He’d reconciled himself to the marriage. I’d known, of course, that he didn’t exactly approve of it, but he’d been very tactful.”

  “But you did tell Arthur Whitewell the whole story?”

  “Yes.”

  “And,” I said, watching her narrowly, “I suppose it knocked him right off the Christmas tree?”

  “It was a terrible shock to him,” she said. “But he was perfectly splendid. He told me that at first he hadn’t approved of me, but that he finally realized Philip was desperately in love with me, and that he had cared enough about his son so that he wanted him to have whatever would make him happy; that if Philip wanted me, then he had planned to take me into the family and had made up his mind that neither of us would ever know that he hadn’t exactly approved. He was frank enough to tell me that. I was more attracted to him then than I ever had been. He was simply splendid. He comforted me, and—well, he was so wise and understanding and tolerant, and yet he looked at the thing from such a common-sense angle.”

  “What was his angle?”

  “He said, of course, that now we couldn’t go ahead with the marriage, and he told me what I’d known already, that if Philip realized I’d been married, that there was another man living who had been—the first in my affections, who had been my husband, who had lived with me, who—well, if you know Philip, you understand how he might feel about that. He’s abnormally sensitive, and—his father confirmed my worst fears on that point.”

  “Go ahead with the rest of it,” I told her.

  “I showed him Helen Framley’s letter. He told me how much he appreciated my being perfectly honest about it all. He said that many a woman would have been tempted to go through with the marriage and do exactly as this Miss Framley had suggested. But he said that I’d better write her and tell her that now the marriage was absolutely out of the question, so that Jannix wouldn’t get in touch with Philip.”

  “Why did he want to keep Jannix from getting in touch with Philip?”

  “He didn’t want Philip to be disillusioned so brutally. That was the idea back of the whole thing. I was to save face, but it wasn’t on my own account. It was to protect Philip.”

  “Who suggested it?”

  “Why, it was something we worked out together, sort of a collaboration. He said that for the time being, at least, I must step out of the picture in some way so that Philip would never know what had happened until after he had accustomed himself to my absence, and then we could let it come out. He said that sometime in the future, if I secured a divorce from Jannix and there was no reason why I couldn’t marry, I could meet Philip again and explain everything to him.”

  “You didn’t feel that you should go to Philip and tell him frankly—”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Lam, I did. That was why I’d gone to the office. I wanted to make a clean breast to Philip and explain things to him. I wanted to try and break it to him so it wouldn’t hurt him quite so much. But his father told me he understood Philip better than I did, and that the thing for me to do was to disappear under such circumstances that it would appear something very unusual had happened to me. I really think he was thinking as much of himself as of Philip. You see, the announcements of the engagement had all been made and the wedding date was set; and if— Well, you know how it is. You simply have to make some explanation under those circumstances. The Whitewell family was in a peculiar position.”

  “In other words, Whitewell didn’t want to go to his friends at the club, and have one of them say, ‘Did your son get married today?’ and have to say, ‘No. After all, we found the woman had another husband living, so we called it off.’ “

  She winced.

  I said, “I’m being brutal because I want you to see it ‘ from my angle.”

  “What is your angle?”

  “I don’t know just yet, but I think I know.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you see? Philip would have forgiven you. He’d have insisted that it wasn’t your fault, that you go ahead and get a divorce and his marriage with you would merely be postponed.”

  “I don’t think Philip could ever have forgiven me for not having told him about my first marriage.”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, I don’t, and I know him better than you.”

  “His father knows him pretty well,” I said, “and his father thought so.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because his father used the opportunity to get you out of the picture, and to have you do something for which Philip never would forgive you. Don’t you see? If you ever came back to Philip and tried to explain to him you’d be sunk. Philip could never forget the suffering he’d experienced when you disappeared under such circumstances that he didn’t know and couldn’t know what had happened to you. He’s been tortured by thoughts that perhaps you’d been abducted and were in some danger. That—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to start you crying again, but I just want you to understand.”

  “But Mr. Whitewell promised he’d tell Philip if it turned out that Philip became too worried about—”

  “That,” I said, “is all I wanted to know.”

  “What?”

  I said, “That means Whitewell took you for a ride.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Don’t you understand? If he’d ever explained it to Philip, he’d necessarily have to tell Philip how he knew, and in order to do that, he’d have to admit to Philip that he’d been a party to the deception, that he’d talked with you, that he was the one who had kept you from waiting to see Philip and telling him the whole story. Philip would probably have forgiven you—and something could have been worked out. Arthur Whitewell could have had some so-called important New York business deal take Philip back east. The wedding could have been postponed until he returned, and Whitewell could have explained to his friends that it was just a postponement. And during that time, you could have secured your divorce from Jannix. Philip will never forgive his father for handling the situation in this way. And if he knows the real facts now he’ll never forgive you.”

  She said, “I can’t understand. Why, I thought you were working for Mr. Whitewell.”

  “He employed me.”

  “Well?”

  “But,” I said, “he employed me to find you, to discover why you’d left, and what had happened to you. That was all I had to do, and I’ve done it.”

  She sat looking at me as though she were just recovering from a terrific punch on the jaw.

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “I’m not going to do anything. You’re the one that’s going to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  I said, “You’re going to trump the old man’s ace.”

  “But I don’t understand.”

  “You disappeared,” I said, “under such circumstances that you might have had a sudden attack of amnesia.”

  “Yes. That was the way he wanted it to appear.”

  “He, of course, suggested you write Helen Framley, so Sidney wouldn’t write Philip?”

  “Yes.”

  “And gave you a sheet of paper and furnished you with a stamped envelope?”

  “Yes.”

  “And while you may have thought you were collaborating, the essential scheme of this disappearance of yours was thought up by him?”

  “Well—yes, I guess so. He told me I had to save the family’s honor, and that it would be better and more beautiful to have Philip keep on loving me and always cherish the memory of our love, than to be brutally disillusioned and perhaps hate me.”

  “All right. You did just what you seemed to do.”

  “What?”

  “Suffered a loss of memory.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Go right through with it. You suffered a complete loss of memory. You were in the office. You reached for a pencil and—bingo. Your mind went blank. You found yourself out on the street without any idea of who you were or what your name was or how you happened to be there.”

  “What good would that do? How would that help?”

  “Don’t you see? You’re picked up, suffering from amnesia. You’re taken to a hospital, and the Bertha Cool Detective Agency finds you. You can’t remember who you are. Your mind is a blank, but the good old Cool Detective Agency has tracked you down, and Philip comes to identify you. The minute you look on Philip’s face, the shock of seeing the man you love brings back your reason and—”