The Street of Seven Stars

Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by relief at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about again, weak naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little less florid. But the week's confinement had given him an opportunity to think over many things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he had packed up the last of Marie's small belongings and sent them down to Vienna.

Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. "Just how much talk do you suppose this has made, Byrne?" he asked.

"Haven't an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it, you know."

Stewart's brows contracted.

"Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!"

"Probably."

Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie's American trunk of which she had been so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.

"Don't you think you'd better tell the girl all about it?"

"No," doggedly.

"I know, of course, it wouldn't be easy, but--you can't get away with it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's another."

"What's that?"

"Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and not a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to it."

"She wouldn't understand in a thousand years."

"Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow. A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a man has done with his life before a girl--the right girl--comes into it isn't a personal injury to her, since she wasn't a part of his life then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she chooses."

"How many would choose under those circumstances?" he jibed.

Peter smiled. "Quite a few," he said cheerfully. "It's a wrong system, of course; but we can get a little truth out of it."

"You can't get away with it" stuck in Stewart's mind for several days. It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the affair against his conscience and came out victorious.

Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows turned soft by midday; and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita's arm forbade her traveling. In the reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in the valley below the pension with one of the women who wished to take the baths.