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Show TnE STORY THUS FAR.: Zorle Corey rad a date with Paul Duncan, her fiance, which she feared she could not keep, as her employer's wife had asked her to personally distribute 30 Invitations for her tea next week. Zorle tried to gc her fiance 'hy phone at his boarding house, but failed. She feared he would icold her for not being punctual. Looking Look-ing down at a burnished Buddha on her desk she made three wishes, one being that she might be whisked to a leisurely land of palms and Jade green seas and of delightful people too gallant to take advantage ad-vantage of meekness. Later she called at her employer's home and picked up the Invitations. She was tempted to buy stamps for the whole lot and mall them. CHAPTER n The next instant, as she started to giggle over her rebellious impulse, she unexpectedly burst into tears. This sudden gush of tears, although it took her by surprise, as Paul .would have assured her and as she fully realized herself was beautiful-. beautiful-. ly motivated. It wasn't self-pity. It was fury at her meekness which would permit a selfish, overbearing woman like Mrs. Folsome to ask a girl without a car to deliver thirty silly invitations on a night like this. She leaned against the telephone pole and sobbed, with her bag dangling dan-gling from one hand, the cellophane-wrapped cellophane-wrapped packet of invitations limply limp-ly held in the other. Suddenly a man's deep, resonant voice said banteringly, "Don't cry, my pretty; I'll buy your violets." She looked up and saw him through twin waterfalls of tears. He had appeared magically from nowhere. no-where. Pie might have sprung out of. the ground. He, too, was leaning lean-ing against the pole. He was looking look-ing down at her. There was something some-thing languid and lazy and perpetually perpetu-ally relaxed about him, yet there was a hint that, with sufficient prov-j prov-j oration, he might go suddenly into action, 1 He was a big man of about thirty, with a big head of curly hair above a big sunbrowned face. Everything about him was outsize his shoulders, shoul-ders, his hands, his mouth. It was a symmetrically sculptured mouth, with the cleanly defined, perfectly matched lips of a Buddha. What she could see of his expression expres-sion through her tears was sympathetic sympa-thetic and not amused. There was ; something of the sea about him, especially about his eyes. And there was something familiar about him, as if she had met him before. But It was remote and vague. '. Zorie lifted her face and the light tell upon it. The strange man stared. He jerked his head back. "Hey!" he said softly. His voice sounded breathless. "What the devil are you doing here?" HZone was bewildered. For. a moment mo-ment this man had acted as if he knew her, as if his glimpse of her lace had shocked him. Then she realized that he was shocked by the oe in her face. The man had blue eyes, dark blue Md clear and attentive. He listened to her with gravity, now and then - adding as if he understood, and now and then smiling quickly as she t made a nice point, sometimes only . In the back of his eyes, sometimes with his large mouth, and sometimes ith mouth and eyes, crinkling them lthe corners so that the sun-dark- Iened skin was starred with flashings white. And at these moments be could see him more clearly than ver on the bridge of a ship, g hadn't even the courage," rie concluded, laughing, "to ring j! the bell again and ask that maid i wr an umbrella." m He was nodding. He smiled slowly slow-ly and mysteriously. "Always, in e of doubt," he said in his deep. 1Jonic voice, "obey your first im- Me. Since you haven't obeyed Jours, I will now obey mine." J He reached down and took the JJ Packet of invitations out of her hand. - Before she could stop him. he had (J dipped off the cellophane, had torn 0 thirty invitations lengthwise, had Weed the two pads of white strips 0 St had t0rn thcm across' and O U tossed the snowy quarters into ft trash basket. 0 Zorie gasped and delivered at that ff'jnwit a smaU shriek of dismay, w h V38 lookinS down at her and A loo. Sf" She Was lauShinS nw r a rre was something uncanny ,J IT? ence of this tall, blue-"X blue-"X K0Ungman- It wasn't so much 0 11118 strength gave her the cour-A cour-A tet a !uCe consequences of his IV ic ;S8 0,31 he gave her a reckless ii J;rence t0 them- in a pre- "rnent like the one she now faced. the ri,TieckleS8 indifference if not At J? f couraSe? - he., Wstant- a disembodied red 1 We,ared in doorway of Pro-I Pro-I Zr McGonigle's house and a irascible voice cried: "Hey! T.ehere. dammit!" UttJJ aye' sir!" the taU man an- tUrl etranEe thing happened. itr SP f abbed Zorle and pulled 7T WtS? lhc teIePhone pole. A y drlJiJ BCdan' kind you rent, f ' f 60 much an hour, i Wr!!f slowly al0"S Maple i' nt th? ?g plPPnS sounds as it A man and rhac. sPerhaps another man, ; Urueaoman-were sitting in Wn-J Was leaning forward, J Vsn! -the opened window at - McGonlgie'g house. Then he turned his head and looked in Zorie's direction. She saw his face clearly and she caught the glint of the street light in his eyes and she saw, for Just an instant, the small white scar on his dark face. It was about an inch under his left eye. She only caught that glimpse of him because, as the green sedan went by, the man behind her maneuvered ma-neuvered her by the shoulders so that the telephone pole was always between her and the car. When it was halfway down the block, the strong, warm hands on her shoulders relaxed. "Okay," he said softly. "Taxi!" he yelled. The taxi turned around and came over. It had been parked all this time, she realized, in front of Professor Pro-fessor McGonigle's house. Professor Profes-sor McGonigle was the head of the Department of Psychology. The mysterious young man opened the door and said, "Get in." Zorie got in and sat down, expecting him to follow. He glanced at the meter and gave the driver a bill. "Take this young lady wherever she wants to go." he directed. He gazed at Zorie, as if he were troubled about her, then he slowly nodded his head, and said, "It's high time you stopped being so gaga, ga-ga, isn't it, baby? Good luck!" He closed the door. The taxi started and Zorie fell back against the scat with a gasp. She was furious again, partly at what he had said, partly because the liveliest episode of her life had ended, end-ed, and she was returning to reality. "Hey," he said softly, "what the devil are you doing here?" His mystifying spell was broken. Nothing remained of him but his deed and its consequences to her nothing but her knocking knees, her banging heart, her burning cheeks and her rapid breathing. "Home, Miss Corey?" the driver said. She recognized him as a graduate of several years back for whom she had once copied a term paper. "Yes, Don," she replied, and wondered won-dered what she would say to Mrs. Folsome. The door into the kitchen was open and Zorie saw the usual stack of dirty dishes in the sink Aunt Hannah's Han-nah's luncheon and supper dishes. With her senses sharper than usual, usu-al, Zorie looked about the small, fussy, overstuffed living-room. It looked untidy. Ashtrays were full. The room had a stale, smoky smell. She glanced automatically at the onyx clock on the mantel. The time shocked her. It was almost 'eight-thirty. 'eight-thirty. Paul had said he would drop around at eight. He might have called and, not finding her home, gone away, furious. With a whimper of dismay, she ran to the telephone. She called his boarding-house. He was out still. "It's high time," he had said, "you stopped being so ga-ga, isn't it, baby?" It was indeed, baby. As she stared at her tired, blue eyes, they grew sharper. Behind them, resolution was forming. Here was a girl who was, some day, going to do something some-thing drastic! The day was coming when no one, not even Paul, was going to push her around. But why not today? The vehemence of her thoughts put color into her cheeks, brilliance into her eyes. "I'll tell them! No one's going to push sne around any more! I'm sick of it, do you hear?" The telephone rang. She turned so rapidly she twisted her ankle and bumped a chair with her knee. Limping, she ran. It was Paul. The very sound of his voice had the same effect on her that oil has on a ruffled sea. Her tears became tears of gladness. glad-ness. "Darling!" she caroled. "Zorie, where the devil have you been? I've been trying to get you" "I'm so . . ." she began. "I'll be late." be said curtly. "That grandfather of mine Jvst popped into town. I've been trying to get away. I wanted to bring my dissertation around." "Is it done?" she cried. "I don't know," he answered in the same cross way. "I was up to my ears in It when that old pest found me. I'll be over as soon as I can. Goodby." He hung up. Zorle looked at the receiver In her hand, and her eyes were quite dry. She was seeing things, once more, in a clear perspective. Paul was not cross because of her but because be-cause of his grandfather Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry Duncan, retired, re-tired, who had, Paul had often mentioned, men-tioned, the most maddening way of dropping in without warning on his twelve scattered grandchildren and upsetting their lives with his impossible im-possible demands. He was a patriarch patri-arch of the old school, a tyrant. He was one of the richest sugar planters plant-ers in Hawaii and when one of his grandchildren opposed him, he would make vague references to drawing up a new will and leaving his miUions to charity. Zorie understood all this, yet, she reasoned, Paul should not have taken tak-en it out on her. Paul was often inconsiderate. Just then the doorbell rang. A tall, . lanky youth with worried brown eyes was at the door. Zorie concealed her disappointment, and laughed anyway. For here was a man whose disposition needed smoothing. He was Jimmy HoiT-brower, HoiT-brower, a junior majoring in econ, and she knew that he was making pretty bad weather of several courses. "Come in, Jimmy." "You know a lot about econ," Jimmy said anxiously. "If you see anything wrong, just sort of fix it, will you, as you go along?" "Yes, Jimmy." "Could I have it in the morning-first morning-first thing?" "Yes. Drop by and pick it up." He was as grateful as a puppy the nice, not the Toby, kind of puppy. As she typed Jimmy Hoffbrower's term paper, swiftly and accurately, making corrections of all sorts as she went along, her mind was busy with matters pertaining to herself. It never occurred to Zorie that she had a rather remarkable mind; that it might be considered something of a feat to correct and type flawlessly a sentence that had contained one misspelled word, two mistakes in punctuation and a grave error in reasoning while she was wondering what she would say to Mrs. Folsome Fol-some tomorrow. Now and then through her mind like bright arrows went thoughts of the strange mysterious man to whom she had babbled in the rain, his magical appearance beside her, as if he were an ultra-modern Aladdin, Alad-din, when she had rubbed what? The telephone pole? And she again wondered why he had pulled her behind the pole when the green sedan se-dan had come along. Aunt Hannah,- sighing with weariness weari-ness from the walk from her backyard back-yard garage to the living-room, came in at about ten-thirty, paused in the alcove doorway and said indifferently, in-differently, "Oh, so you're working. Did you feed Toby?" "Yes, darling, some of that pink stuff he loves so," Zorie answered, meanwhile catching that familiar offender, of-fender, "seperate.V as it went by, and wondering if the mysterious man in the rain was really a psychologist and, if so, or if not, if he had told Mrs, McGonigle, and if Mrs. McGonigle had already told Mrs. Folsome. and what Paul would say about it when he heard. Aunt Hannah, sighing, went upstairs up-stairs and to bed. One detail of Zorie's problem was cleared up a few minutes later when the phone rang. Mrs. Folsome's saccharine voice said. "I just called, dear, to make sure you'd delivered all the invitations." Caught unprepared, Zorie's agile young brain tried frantically to concoct con-coct a he that would cover everything. every-thing. For one mad moment she was tempted to say, "Yes, dear Mrs. Folsome, they were all delivered to the trash basket on your corner." She said feebly, "Yes, Mrs. Folsome." Fol-some." That was all. Period. "That's just splendid, dear! I hope you didn't get your feet wet." "Oh, no." "That's just splendid! Good night, dear!" "Good night," Zorie said thickly. She hung up the receiver and fell back in the chair. She jumped up and began to walk up and down the crowded little living-room, trying to calm herself. She needed, for the state she was in, a word that would combine hectic and frantic . . . Hantic? . . . No frectic! She returned to her typing and made so many mistakes she had to recopy a page. At eleven-thirty, the doorbell rang again. She opened the door with none of her previous joyousness, with no laughter on her lips. Her hair was disarrayed, and her face was shiny with the oil of panic and honest effort. (TO BE CONTINUED) |