When she asked him why,
he said, frankly:
"Pete Cheever's got me beat. I know when I'm licked."
Pete's courtship was what the politicians call a whirlwind campaign.
Charity was Mrs. Cheever before she knew it. Her friends continued
to call her Charity Coe, but she was very much married.
Cheever was a man of shifting ardors. His soul was filled with
automatic fire-extinguishers. He flared up quickly, but when his
temperature reached a certain degree, sprinklers of cold water
opened in his ceiling and doused the blaze, leaving him unharmed
and hardly scorched. It had been so with his loves.
After a brief and blissful honeymoon, Peter Cheever's capricious
soul kindled at the thought of an exploration of war-filled Europe.
His blushing bride was a hurdle-rider, too, and loved a risk-neck
venture. She insisted on going with him.
He accepted the steering-wheel of a motor-ambulance and left his
bride to her own devices while he shot along the poplar-plumed roads
of France at lightning speed.
Charity drifted into hospital service. Her first soldier, the
tortured victim of a gas-attack, was bewailing the fate of his
motherless child. Charity brought a smile to what lips he had by
whispering:
"I am rich. I will adopt your little girl."
It was the first time she had ever boasted of being rich. The man
died, whispering: "_Merci, Madame! Merci, Madame!_" Another
father was writhing in the premature hell of leaving a shy little
unprotected boy to starve.
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