She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one thing, and better balanced always.  She let him stroke her hand, standing near him with her eyes absent and a little hard.

“I’d better make sure that was Jud first,” he offered, after a time, “and then warn him.”

“Why?”

“Bassett will be after him.”

“No!” she commanded sharply.  “No, Fred. You let the thing alone.  You’ve built up an imaginary situation, and you’re not thinking straight.  Plenty of things might happen.  What probably has happened is that this Bassett is at home and in bed.”

She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went back to the hotel.  But, alone later on in her suite in the Ardmore she did not immediately go to bed.  She put on a dressing gown and stood for a long time by her window, looking out.  Instead of the city lights, however, she saw a range of snow-capped mountains, and sheltered at their foot the Clark ranch house, built by the old millionaire as a place of occasional refuge from the pressure of his life.  There he had raised his fine horses, and trained them for the track.  There, when late in life he married, he had taken his wife for their honeymoon and two years later, for the birth of their son.  And there, when she died, he had returned with the child, himself broken and prematurely aged, to be killed by one of his own stallions when the boy was fifteen.

Six years his own master, Judson had been twenty-one to her twenty, when she first met him.  Going the usual pace, too, and throwing money right and left.  He had financed her as a star, ransacking Europe for her stage properties, and then he fell in love with her.  She shivered as she remembered it.  It had been desperate and terrible, because she had cared for some one else.

Standing by the window, she wondered as she had done over and over again for ten years, what would have happened if, instead of marrying Howard, she had married Judson Clark?  Would he have settled down?  She had felt sometimes that in his wildest moments he was only playing a game that amused him; that the hard-headed part of him inherited from his father sometimes stood off and watched, with a sort of interested detachment, the follies of the other.  That he played his wild game with his tongue in his cheek.

She left the window, turned out the lights and got into her bed.  She was depressed and lonely, and she cried a little.  After a time she remembered that she had not put any cream on her face.  She crawled out again and went through the familiar motions in the dark.

VIII

Dick rose the next morning with a sense of lightness and content that sent him singing into his shower.  In the old stable which now housed both Nettie and the little car Mike was washing them both with indiscriminate wavings of the hose nozzle, his old pipe clutched in his teeth.  From below there came up the odors of frying sausages and of strong hot coffee.