Free Dangerous Days: by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page A

them.”
    For an uneasy moment he thought she was going to kiss him. But she let her hands fall, and smiling faintly, led the way downstairs. Once down, however, she voiced the under lying thought in her mind.
    “If he comes out, Clay, he’ll never forgive me, probably. And if he is - if he doesn’t, I’ll never forgive myself. So I’m damned either way.”
    But ten minutes later, with a man on either side of her, she was sitting at the piano with a cigaret tucked behind her ear, looking distractingly pretty and very gay and singing a slightly indecorous but very witty little French song.
    Clayton Spencer, cutting in on the second rubber, wondered which of the many he knew was the real Audrey. He wondered if Chris had not married, for instance, the girl at the piano, only to find she was the woman upstairs. And he wondered, too, if that were true, why he should have had to clear out. So many men married the sort Audrey had been, in Chris’s little study, only to find that after all the thing they had thought they were getting was a pose, and it was the girl at the piano after all.
    He missed her, somewhat later. She was gone a full half hour, and he fancied her absence had something to do with the money she had borrowed.

CHAPTER VII
    Two things helped greatly to restore Clayton to a more normal state of mind during the next few days. One of them undoubtedly was the Valentine situation. Beside Audrey’s predicament and Chris’s wretched endeavor to get away and yet prove himself a man, his own position seemed, if not comfortable, at least tenable. He would have described it, had he been a man to put such a thing into words, as that “he and Natalie didn’t exactly hit it off.”
    There were times, too, during those next few days, when he wondered if he had not exaggerated their incompatibility. Natalie was unusually pleasant. She spent some evening hours on the arm of his big chair, talking endlessly about the Linndale house, and he would lean back, smiling, and pretend to a mad interest in black and white tiles and loggias.
    He made no further protest as to the expense.
    “Tell me,” he said once, “what does a fellow wear in this - er - Italian palace? If you have any intention of draping me in a toga and putting vine leaves in my hair, or whatever those wreaths were made of -!”
    Natalie had no sense of humor, however. She saw that he meant to be amusing, and she gave the little fleeting smile one gives to a child who is being rather silly.
    “Of course,” he went on, “we’ll have Roman baths, and be anointed with oil afterwards by lady Greek slaves. Perfumed oil.”
    “Don’t be vulgar, Clay.” And he saw she was really offended.
    While there was actually no change in their relationship, which remained as it had been for a dozen years, their surface life was pleasanter. And even that small improvement cheered him greatly. He was thankful for such a peace, even when he knew that he had bought it at a heavy price.
    The other was his work. The directorate for the new munition plant had been selected, and on Thursday of that week he gave a dinner at his club to the directors. It had been gratifying to him to find how easily his past reputation carried the matter of the vast credits needed, how absolutely his new board deferred to his judgment. The dinner became, in a way, an ovation. He was vastly pleased and a little humbled. He wanted terribly to make good, to justify their faith in him. They were the big financial men of his time, and they were agreeing to back his judgment to the fullest extent.
    When the dinner was over, a few of the younger men were in no mood to go home. They had dined and wined, and the night was young. Denis Nolan, who had been present as the attorney for the new concern, leaned back in his chair and listened to them with a sort of tolerant cynicism.
    “Oh, go home, you fellows,” he said at last. “You make me sick. Enough’s enough. Why the devil does every dinner like this