Ashes to ashes

“Well, that’s the situation.” Wendle Foulkes’ keen old eyes narrowed as they gazed into the turbulent ones of his client across the wide desk. “This last batch of securities is absolutely all that you have left of your inheritance from your father. Leave them alone where they are and you are sure of three thousand a year for yourself and for Leila after you.”

Norman Storm struck the desk impatiently, and his lean, aristocratic face darkened.

“Three thousand a year! It wouldn’t cover the running expenses of the car and our country club bills alone!” he exclaimed. “I tell you, Foulkes, this investment is a sure thing; it will pay over thirty per cent in dividends in less than four years. I have straight inside information on it—”

“So you had on all the other impulsive, ill-judged ventures that have wiped out your capital, Norman.” The attorney sighed wearily. “I don’t want to rub it in, but do you realize that you have squandered nearly four hundred thousand dollars in the past ten years on wildcat schemes and speculations? You’ve come to the end now; think it over. Your salary with the Mammoth Trust Company is fifteen thousand a year—on eighteen you and your wife ought to be living fairly comfortably. I grant you that three thousand income per annum isn’t much to leave Leila in the event of your death, but it is better than the risk of utter insolvency, and she’s been spending her own money pretty fast lately.”

“It is hers, to do with as she pleases!” Storm retorted sulkily and then flushed as the school-boyishness of his own attitude was borne in upon his consciousness. “You cannot make big money unless you take a chance. I’ve been unlucky, that’s all. My father made all his in Wall Street, and his father before him——”

“In solid investments, not speculations; and they were on the inside themselves. They had the capital to take a gambler’s chance and the acumen to play the game.” Foulkes rose and laid his hand paternally upon the younger man’s shoulder. “Forgive me, my boy, but you haven’t the temperament, the knowledge of when to stop and the strength to do it. Of course, this money is yours unreservedly; you may have it if you want to risk this last venture, but it will take some time for me to convert the securities into cash. Remember, you have reached the bottom of the basket; I only want you to stop and consider, and not to jeopardize the last few thousand you have in the world.”

Outside in the bright May sunshine once more, Storm shouldered his way through the noon-tide throng on the busy pavement with scant ceremony, his resentment hot against the man he had just left. Confound old Foulkes! Why didn’t he keep his smug counsels for those who came sniveling to him for them? As if he, an official of a huge and noted corporation, were a mere lad once more, to be lectured for over-spending his allowance!

The fact that the position he held with the trust company entailed no financial responsibility and was practically an honorary one, granted him solely because of his father’s former connection with that institution, was a point which did not present itself to his mind. He was occupied in closing his mental eyes to the truth of the lawyer’s arraignment, bolstering his defiance with excuses for the repeated fiascos of his past ventures, and the secret knowledge that Foulkes had read him aright only added fuel to the flames.

Still inwardly seething, he crossed Broadway and plunged into another narrow, crowded cross-street lined by towering office buildings whose walls rose like cliffs on either side. From the tallest of these, an imposing structure of white stone which reared a shaft high above its neighbors, a woman emerged and mingled with the hurrying host before him. She was not a toiler of the financial district; that was evident from the costly simplicity of the smart little toque upon her shining golden hair and the correct lines of her severely tailored costume. She was undeniably pretty with the delicate, tender irregularity of feature which just escapes actual beauty; yet it was not that which caused Norman Storm to halt and drove from him all thought of the late interview.

It was his wife. Leila! What possible errand could have brought her to the city and to this portion of it? Surely an unexpected one, for she had not told him of any such intention; indeed, to his knowledge she had never before invaded the precincts of finance, and he could conceive of no possible reason for her presence there.

As he paused, momentarily petrified with astonishment, a stout little man upon the opposite curb also caught sight of the young woman’s hurrying figure, and he, too, stopped in surprise, a smile lighting his plain, commonplace features. Then, as though drawn by a magnet, his pale, rather faded blue eyes traveled straight to where Norman Storm stood, the surprise deepened, and with a half-audible exclamation he started across the street toward him; but a long double line of drays and motor trucks barred his way.

Meanwhile Leila had vanished utterly in the crowd, and Storm realizing the futility of an attempt to overtake her, dismissed the matter from his thoughts with a shrug. She would tell him of her errand, of course, on his return home; and a conference of importance awaited his immediate presence at the office of the trust company.

The conference developed complications which delayed him until long after the closing hour, forcing him to forego an engagement with Millard for a round of golf at the country club. He likewise missed his accustomed train bearing the club car out to Greenlea and was compelled to herd in with commuters bound for the less exclusive suburban communities on the line.

Storm was not a snob, but the atmosphere of petty clerking and its attendant interests grated upon his tired, highly strung sensibilities; the unsatisfactory interview of the morning with Foulkes returned to exasperate him further and he was in no very genial frame of mind when he alighted at the station.

But Barker was on hand promptly with the smart little car which consumed such an incredible amount of gasolene, and the air of the soft spring twilight was infinitely grateful after the smoke and stuffiness of the train. As they drove swiftly past the rolling lawns of one spacious landscape garden after another, each burgeoning with its colorful promise of the blossoming year, his taut nerves relaxed, and he settled back in contented ease. What if he had been unlucky in past speculations, if old Foulkes did consider him an unstable weakling? Leila believed in him, and she was his, all his!

The glimmer of white upon the veranda half-hidden in the trees resolved itself into a slender, fairy-like figure, and as he alighted from the car and mounted the steps she caught his hands in the eager, childish way which was one of her chief charms.

“Oh, Norman, how late you are! Poor dear, did they keep him at that wretched old office and make him miss his golf?” She lifted her face for his evening kiss, and her soft, blue eyes glowed with a deep, warm light. “George is here; I mean, he ’phoned from the Millards’. He’s coming over for dinner.”

“That’s the reason for the début of the new white gown, eh?” Storm laughed. “By Jove, I believe I ought to be jealous of old George! When a man’s wife and his best friend——”

“Don’t!” There was a quick note almost of distress in Leila’s tones. “I don’t like to hear you joke that way about him, dear. He seems so lonely, standing just outside of life, somehow. He hasn’t anything of this!”

She waved her little hands in a comprehensive gesture as if to take in the whole atmosphere of the home, and her husband laughed carelessly once more.

“It’s his own fault, then. Don’t waste any sympathy on him on that score, Leila. George is a confirmed old bachelor; he would run a mile from a suggestion of domesticity.” At the door he turned. “Oh, I say dear——”

But Leila was already down the steps and had started across the lawn, at the farther side of which Storm discerned a short stout commonplace figure approaching; and turning once more he hastened to his room to change.

George Holworthy, two years his senior, had been a classmate of Storm’s at the university twenty years before, and the companionship—rather a habit of association than a friendship—which had grown up between the undisciplined, high-spirited boy and his duller, more phlegmatic comrade had proved a lasting one despite the wide dissimilarity in their natures. Storm was too fastidious, Holworthy too seriously inclined, for dissipation to have attracted either of them, but while the former had drifted, plunging recklessly from one speculation to another, the latter had plodded slowly, steadily ahead until at forty-two he had amassed a comfortable fortune and attained a position of established recognition among his business associates.

An hour later, as they sat drinking their after-dinner coffee on the veranda, Leila’s words returned to his mind, and Storm found himself eying his guest in half-disparaging appraisal. Good, stupid old George! How stodgy and middle-aged he was getting to be! His hair was noticeably thin on top and peppered with gray and he looked like anything but an assured, successful man of affairs as he lounged, round-shouldered, in his chair, his mild eyes blinking nearsightedly at Leila, who sat on the veranda steps cradling one chiffon clad knee between her clasped hands.

George looked every day of fifty. Now, if he would only patronize a smart tailor, join a gymnasium and work some of that adipose tissue off, he wouldn’t be half bad-looking. Unconsciously Norman Storm squared his shoulders and drew his slim, lithe form erect in his chair. Then his muscles tightened convulsively and he sat with every nerve tense, for a snatch of the disjointed conversation had penetrated his abstraction and its import stunned him.

“You weren’t in town to-day, then?” The question, seemingly a repetition of some statement of Leila’s, came stammeringly from Holworthy’s lips.

“Oh, dear, no!” Her laugh tinkled out upon the soft air. “I haven’t been in perfect ages! It doesn’t attract me now that spring is here.”

Not in town! But he had seen her himself! Sheer surprise held Storm silent for a moment.

When he spoke his voice sounded strange to his own ears.

“Where were you all day, Leila? What did you do with yourself?”

“I—I lunched out at the Ferndale Inn with Julie Brewster.” Her tone was low, and she did not turn her head toward him as she replied, adding hurriedly: “George, when are you going to give up those stuffy rooms of yours in town and take a bungalow out here? You can keep bachelor hall just as well; lots of nice men are doing it . . .”

Through the desultory talk which followed, Storm sat as if in a trance. If the blue tailored frock and hat with its saucy quill had not been familiar to him in every line, he could still not have mistaken that glimpse of her profile, the carriage of her head, the coil of shining, spun-gold hair. Ferndale Inn was twenty miles away, a good sixty from town, and inaccessible save by motor; she could not possibly have reached there in time for luncheon, for it was after twelve when she had passed him on that crowded, downtown street. She had told a deliberate falsehood; but why?