g to do!"

He shook his head, turning away his eyes to hide their tears.

"You been stung, Loo. Nothing on earth can change that."

She turned his face back to her, smiling through her own tears.

"You're not adding up good this morning, Mr. Cox. When do you think I
called you up last night? When could it have been if not after my sister
broke her confidence to tell me? Why do you think all of a sudden last
night I seen your bluff through about Gerber? It was because I knew I had
you where you needed me, Charley--I never would have dragged you down the
other way in a million years, but when I knew I had you where you needed
me--why, from that minute, honey, you didn't have a chance to dodge me!"

She wound her arms round him, trembling between the suppressed hysteria of
tears and laughter.

"Not a chance, Charley!"

He jerked her so that her face fell back from him, foreshortened.

"Loo--oh, girl! Oh, girl!"

Her throat was tight and would not give her voice for coherence.

"Charley--we--we'll show 'em--you--me!"

Looking out above her head at the vapory sky showing through the parting of
the pink-brocade curtains, rigidity raced over Mr. Cox, stiffening his hold
of her.

The lean look had come out in his face; the flanges of his nose quivered;
his head went up.

VI

NIGHTSHADE

Over the silent places of the world flies the vulture of madness, pausing
to wheel above isolated farm-houses, where a wife, already dizzy with the
pressure of rarefied silence, looks up, magnetized. Then across the flat
stretches, his shadow under him moving across moor and the sand of desert,
slowing at the perpetually eastern edge of a mirage, brushing his actual
wings against the brick of city walls; the garret of a dreamer, brain-sick
with reality. Flopping, until she comes to gaze, outside the window of one
so alone in a crowd that her four hall-bedroom walls are closing in upon
her. Lowering over a childless house on the edge of a village.

Were times when Mrs. Hanna Burkhardt, who lived on the edge of a village
in one such childless house, could in her fancy hear the flutter of wings,
too. There had once been a visit to a doctor in High Street because of
those head-noises and the sudden terror of not being able to swallow. He
had stethoscoped and prescribed her change of scene. Had followed two weeks
with cousins fifty miles away near Lida, Ohio, and a day's stop-over in
Cincinnati allowed by her railroad ticke