I ran; when my shaky knees would hold me, I ran.  I wanted to hide my hot face, my disgust, my disillusion; I wanted to put my head in mother’s lap and cry; I wanted to die, or be ill, so I need never see him again.  Perversely enough, I did none of those things.  With my face still flaming, with burning eyes and hands that shook, I made a belated evening toilet and went slowly, haughtily, down the stairs.  My hands were like ice, but I was consumed with rage.  Oh, I would show him—­that this was New York, not Iquique; that the roof was not his Andean tableland.

Every one elaborately ignored my absence from dinner.  The Dallas Browns, Max and Lollie were at bridge; Jim was alone in the den, walking the floor and biting at an unlighted cigar; Betty had returned to Aunt Selina and was hysterical, they said, and Flannigan was in deep dejection because I had missed my dinner.

“Betty is making no end of a row,” Max said, looking up from his game, “because the old lady upstairs insists on chloroform liniment.  Betty says the smell makes her ill.”

“And she can inhale Russian cigarettes,” Anne said enviously, “and gasolene fumes, without turning a hair.  I call a revoke, Dal; you trumped spades on the second round.”

Dal flung over three tricks with very bad grace, and Anne counted them with maddening deliberation.

“Game and rubber,” she said.  “Watch Dal, Max; he will cheat in the score if he can.  Kit, don’t have another clam while I am in this house.  I have eaten so many lately my waist rises and falls with the tide.”

“You have a stunning color, Kit,” Lollie said.  “You are really quite superb.  Who made that gown?”

“Where have you been hiding, du kleine?” Max whispered, under cover of showing me the evening paper, with a photograph of the house and a cross at the cellar window where we had tried to escape.  “If one day in the house with you, Kit, puts me in this condition, what will a month do?”

From beyond the curtain of a sort of alcove, lighted with a red-shaded lamp, came a hum of conversation, Bella’s cool, even tones, and a heavy masculine voice.  They were laughing; I could feel my chin go up.  He was not even hiding his shame.

“Max,” I asked, while the others clamored for him and the game, “has any one been up through the house since dinner?  Any of the men?”

He looked at me curiously.

“Only Harbison,” he replied promptly.  “Jim has been eating his heart out in the den every since dinner; Dal played the Sonata Appasionata backward on the pianola—­he wanted to put through one of Anne’s lingerie waists, on a wager that it would play a tune; I played craps with Lollie, and Flannigan has been washing dishes.  Why?”

Well, that was conclusive, anyhow.  I had had a faint hope that it might have been a joke, although it had borne all the evidences of sincerity, certainly.  But it was past doubting now; he had lain in wait for me at the landing, and had kissed me, me, when he thought I was Jimmy’s wife.  Oh, I must have been very light, very contemptible, if that was what he thought of me!