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never keep a secret from you, can I?”
    “I don’t see why I shouldn’t know.”
    “Man’s reasons, mostly. To save Bracken’s pride.”
    “I always knew she was a slut.”
    “ Eden! ” He gathered her into a mighty hug with affectionate mirth. “I don’t know where you learn such words, not from me!”
    But Eden lay passive in his arms and nursed her wrath against Lisl.
    “Tell me the rest of it now,” she said. “Who is he? How did it happen?”
    “He’s got real money.”
    “Naturally!”
    “Beside him, I’m a pauper. He’s got half a dozen gold-mines in California—came with a letter of introduction to me from that fellow Friedman in Chicago. Wanted to buy the paper out from under me and play politics with it. I managed to convince him that I wasn’t for sale, but meanwhile Lisl’s price-tag was showing and he took up with her.”
    “Where?”
    “Oh, I got awfully tired of him very soon and passed him on to the Bennett crowd. It was at one of their parties that he met Lisl. After that, all I had to do was duck.”
    “Cabot, you mean you saw this thing coming and did nothing to—”
    “I might have warned Bracken, I suppose, but they would only have had another row. All right, I confess I lay low and tried to set a trap for Lisl. And it went wrong. She got away. She was too quick.”
    “I don’t—quite understand,” Eden murmured.
    “Eden, darling, I thought I foresaw that Lisl would betray Bracken with this Californian, yes, but I meant to catch her at it, and put her through the divorce court. Don’t you see, if I could have got proof of her adultery Bracken was free. I preferred a scandal, if necessary, to what he was enduring from her, and I was pretty sure he would prefer it too. She beat me, blast her. She got on that damn’ boat without giving me any evidence I could use in court. I think she saw my game, that’s what hurts! Of course that fellow Hutchinson went on the same boat. They’re made for each other, they’re both tramps. She’s going to show him Europe, and he’s just the fool to enjoy it as long as his money holds out.”
    After a silence Eden said:
    “Won’t he want to marry her?”
    “He’s not quite fool enough for that,” Cabot replied.
    “Then what about Bracken? Must there still be a scandal?”
    “What happens in Europe won’t stink too loud over here, I hope. Anyway, she’s gone, and Bracken’s bank account won’t be bled to death any more, and he isn’t going to be harried into an early grave by a wife he hasn’t been, as we say, living with for some time. Maybe the boat will sink under the weight of her sins. Maybe Hutchinson will shoot her full of lead before he’s through, he all but wore a brace of Colt ·45’s at Delmonico’s! Let him have her, with our blessing. It’s better this way, hard as it seems.”
    “But it still doesn’t leave Bracken free.”
    “No. It only leaves him in peace. We shall have to trace them now, to get divorce evidence. It will be a long, expensive, legal business, I’m afraid, but we shall win in the end and write her off somehow.” He shifted cautiously to lay his face against hers. “Oh, my poor dear—tears. Don’t cry, sweetheart, he’ll weather it. Bracken has the stuff he needs, he won’t go under.”
    Her arm went round his neck, and she held to him convulsively.
    “I feel so wicked ,” she sobbed, “to be so happy and safe with you, when everybody else is so miserable !”
5
    I N SPITE of the extravagant gifts from Sally and the Murrays, it was a meagre Christmas nowadays by the standards of Ransom’s childhood . Ransom could remember when the family Christmases were spent at the Sprague plantation called Farthingale, which lay up the river near Westover and was burned down after Cold Harbor in ’64. Ransom could remember a household of twenty guests and as many more darky servants, not counting the pickaninnies; great feasts which went on for hours, and dancing which lasted till dawn in