“Well, I'll let you know when you're free. Are there any other little chores I can do for you?” “No, thanks. You're one damned good sport, and I'm infernally sorry I--” “Let's not begin on sorries. Good night!” And such was unmarriage _a la mode_. CHAPTER II And now having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity began to feel pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her own rebuke of him for assaulting Cheever had absolved him. In the retrospect, the attack took on a knightliness of devotion. She recalled his lonely dogging of her footsteps. If he had played the dog, after all, she loved dogs. What was so faithful, trustworthy, and lovable as a dog? But how was Charity to get word to Jim of her new heart? She could not whistle him back. She could hardly go to him and apologize for having been a good wife to a bad husband. And a married lady simply must not say to a bachelor: “Pardon me a moment, while I divorce my present consort. I'd like to wear your name for a change.” Charity might have been capable even of such a derring-do if she had known that Jim Dyckman's bachelorhood was threatened with immediate extinction by the Thropps. But she could not know. For, however Jim's soul may have been mumbling, “Help, help!” he made no audible sound. Unwilling brides may shriek for rescue, but unwilling bridegrooms must not complain. By a coincidence that was not strange Charity selected for her lawyer Travers McNiven, the very man that Jim Dyckman selected. All three had been friends since childhood. McNiven had been taken into the famous partnership of Hamnett, Dawsey, Coggeshall, Thurlow & McNiven. When Jim Dyckman telephoned him for an appointment he was told to make it the next morning, as another client had pre-empted the afternoon. Jim was glad enough of an excuse to postpone his marriage by a day, never dreaming that Charity was the client who had preempted McNiven. McNiven wondered at the synchrony, but naturally mentioned neither client to the other. His office was far down-town and far up in the air. Its windows gave an amplitudinous vision of the Harbor which Mr. Ernest Poole has made his own, but which was now a vestibule to the hell of the European war. All the adjoining land was choked far backward with a vast blockade of explosive freight-trains waiting to be unloaded into the unheard-of multitude of munition-ships waiting to run the gantlet of the German submarines. Charity had run that gantlet and was ready to run it again on another errand of mercy, but first she must make sure that Zada's baby should not enter the world before its mother entered wedlock. After McNiven had proffered her a chair and she had exclaimed upon the grandeur of the harborscape, she began: “Sandy, I've come to see you about--” “One moment!” McNiven broke in. “Before you speak I must as an honest lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate.” “But you don't know what it is yet.”