Chapter 28

Late that night John Merkle telephoned Bob Wharton to say:

"Headquarters just rang me up and told me--prepare yourself for a shock--Lilas Lynn is dead."

"Dead?" Bob cried, in a startled voice. "Dead! How? When did it happen? I can't believe it."

Merkle made known the details that had come to him. "Looks like suicide, but they're not sure. Anyhow, she took too much dope of some sort. You can sleep easy now. I wish I could."

"I suppose it's the law of compensation."

"Compensation?" Merkle's voice sounded querulous. "There's no such thing. Don't talk to a Wall Street man about the law of compensation."

"Well, then, call it Providence."

"Providence has too much on its hands to bother with people like her. No, there is a certain--well, immovability about the conventional, and Lilas wasn't strong enough to topple it over."

"I--I'm shocked, of course, and yet I can't help feeling greatly relieved. Rotten thing to say--"

"Not at all. I'm delighted."

"Once I read about a flare-back on a battle-ship, and how a fellow threw himself into the door of the powder-magazine to prevent an explosion. That's me! I'm nearly scorched to death."

Bob's anxiety had been so intense of late that this unexpected solution of his difficulties seemed indeed nothing less than a godsend. Lorelei, thank Heaven! had been saved from any knowledge of the affair, and when he went down to business it was with a lighter heart than he had felt for some time. Bob's acquaintance with Lilas Lynn had been far from pleasant; she had repaid his kindness with treachery, and now, although he was not a callous person, he could not pretend that his pity exceeded his relief. His regrets at the girl's tragic end were those which any normal man would have felt at the death of an acquaintance, but they were far overbalanced now by his joy at the fact that no further shadows menaced the peace of his wife and that once again the future was all dancing sunshine.

Bob had seldom been conscious of a deliberate effort to please himself, for to want a thing had always meant to have it almost before the desire had been recognized. The gratification of his impulses had become a sort of second nature to him, and now, feeling that he owed a debt of friendliness to the world, he was impelled to liquidate it.

He did struggle half-heartedly against his first drink, but after he had taken it and after other drinks had gone the way of the first he was troubled less and less by the consciousness of broken resolves. He met a number of people whom he liked and to whom he was inspired to show his liking, and, strange to say, the more he drank the more of such friends he discovered. By late afternoon he was in a fantastically jubilant mood, and, seizing Kurtz, he