It was expensive to rugs and cheated lawyers and jurors out of fees,
but saved the State no end of money.
Cheever surrendered.
"I'll come home," he said, gulping the last quinine word. It seemed
to him the most loyal thing he could do at the moment. It would have
been unpardonably unkind to Charity to let himself be spattered all
over his office and the newspapers by a well-known like Zada.
Once "home" with Zada, he took the pistol away from her. But she
laughed and said:
"I can always buy another one, deary."
Thus Zada re-established her rights. Cheever was very sorry. He
cursed himself for being so easily led astray. He wondered why it
was his lot to be so fickle and incapable of loyalty. He did not
know. He could only accept himself as he was. Oneself is the most
wonderful, inexplicable thing in the world.
So Charity's brief honeymoon waned, blinked out again.
Jim Dyckman came home from the yacht cruise in blissless ignorance
of all this frustrated drama. He longed to see Charity, but dared
not. He took sudden hope from remembering her determination to go
back abroad to her nursery of wounded soldiers.
He had an inspiration. He would go abroad also--as a member of
the aviation, corps. He already owned a fairly good hydro-aeroplane
which had not killed him yet--he was a good swimmer, and lucky.
He ordered the best war-eagle that could be made, and began to take
lessons in military maps, bird's-eye views, and explosives.
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