Dangerous Days

"They will have to help to support me, won't they?"

And he had felt a trifle chilled.

It was not a part of Marion's program to enter the Spencer family

unwelcomed. She had a furtive fear of Clayton Spencer, the fear of the

indirect for the direct, of the designing woman for the essentially

simple and open male. It was not on her cards to marry Graham and to try

to live on his salary.

So for a few weeks the engagement was concealed even from Mrs.

Hayden, and Graham, who had received some stock from his father on

his twenty-first birthday, secretly sold a few shares and bought the

engagement ring. With that Marion breather easier. It was absolute

evidence.

Her methods were the methods of her kind and her time. To allure a man

by every wile she knew, and having won him to keep him uncertain and

uneasy, was her perfectly simple creed. So she reduced love to its

cheapest terms, passion and jealousy, played on them both, and made

Graham alternately happy and wretched.

Once he found Rodney Page there, lounging about with the manner of a

habitue. It seemed to Graham that he was always stumbling over Rodney

those days, either at home, with drawings and color sketches spread out

before him, or at the Hayden house.

"What's he hanging around here for?" he demanded when Rodney, having

bent over Marion's hand and kissed it, had gone away. "If he could see

that bare spot on the top of his head he'd stop all that kow-towing."

"You're being rather vulgar, aren't you?" Marion had said. "He's a very

old friend and a very dear one."

"Probably in love with you once, like all the rest?"

He had expected denial from her, but she had held her cigaret up in the

air, and reflectively regarded its small gilt tip.

"I'm afraid he's rather unhappy. Poor Rod!"

"About me?"

"About me."

"Look here, Toots," he burst out. "I'm playing square with you. I never

go anywhere but here. I--I'm perfectly straight with you. But every time

here I find some of your old guard hanging round. It makes me wild."

"They've always come here, and as long as our engagement isn't known, I

can't very well stop them."

"Then let me go to father."

"He'll turn you out, you know. I know men, dear old thing, and father is

going to raise a merry little hell about us. He's the sort who wants

to choose his son's wife for him. He'd like to play Providence." She

watched him, smiling, but with slightly narrowed eyes. "I rather think

he has somebody in mind for you now."