If Zélie Marks had been a malicious girl she could, with a few words through the telephone or on paper, have spoiled at a stroke such few chances of happiness as remained to Garth.

The man was completely, almost ludicrously in her power; and Zélie didn't flatter herself that what he had done was done entirely because of trust in her. He did trust her, of course. But as the girl set forth to carry out his wishes, she realised that he had turned to her as much through a man's blindness as through perfect faith in her unfailing friendship.

Friendship! She laughed a little at the word, travelling westward in the luxurious stateroom for which Garth had paid. What a dear fool he was! But all men were like that. When they fell head over heels in love with one woman, they never bothered to analyse the feelings of any other female thing on earth!

Yes, that was about all she was in his eyes—a female thing! He had been in desperate need of help, and she happened to be the one creature who could give the kind he wanted.

Some girls would have refused, she thought. Others would have accepted, and then—behaved like cats. Even she had longed to behave like a cat when she talked to his "wife" through the telephone. "If Marise Sorel dreamed of what he's asked me to do, not one of the things he hopes for could ever by any possibility come to pass," Zélie reminded herself, as she gazed without seeing it at the flying landscape. "Not that they ever will come to pass anyhow. But it shan't be my fault that he's disappointed."

Miss Marks honestly believed that she was unselfish in her service; yet something far down in the depths of her prayed to gain a reward for it in the far, far future.

The one thing which seemed certain about this wild marriage was, that it wouldn't last. Sooner or later—probably sooner!—there'd be a divorce. Then, maybe, Jack Garth would remember what his pal Zélie Marks had done for him. He'd turn to her for comfort as now he turned for help. Love—real love—was sometimes born in such ways: and Zélie didn't for an instant let herself think that Garth's love for Marise Sorel was real. It was infatuation, and was bound to pass when he found out what a vain, self-centred girl his idol was; whereas Zélie Marks had been loyally his chum for years.

Zélie had loved Garth long before the war, when she knew him in Albuquerque. She was learning stenography then, after her father died, and when there was no one for her to live with except an aunt. The aunt was quite a good aunt, and a friend of Mrs. Mooney—Jack's "Mothereen"; but Zélie had wanted to be independent. Jack and Mothereen had been kind to the girl; and when Jack began building a house near his beloved Grand Canyon, for a little while Zélie had tremblingly prayed that it was meant for her to live in. Later, she had begun to lose hope, but not wholly. And then the war had broken out in Europe. Almost at once Garth had dashed over to England and offered his services, on the plea that his father, a Yorkshire man, had never been naturalised as an American.

Zélie couldn't rest in Albuquerque after that. She went east, and would quietly have slipped away after Garth to Europe as a Red Cross nurse if she hadn't been afraid he would suspect why she followed. Instead, she stopped in New York, and got work as a stenographer with a firm of engineers, thanks to an introduction from Jack. When America flung herself into the war-furnace too, Zélie Marks did train as a nurse: but in little more than a year came the Armistice, and the girl reluctantly took up her old profession again.

Now, she loved Major Garth, V.C., a hundred times more than she had loved Jack Garth, the smart young inventor. Yet here she was on the way to Arizona, where she had promised to go and get his house (that house she had once thought might be hers!) ready to receive another woman!

When he had come to her flat early in the morni............