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Chapter 1

The Secret Elopement

Catherine MacArthur was a divorcee, wise in the ways of men.

She attracted men.

She sparkled.

She was aggressive of manner.

A spirited young woman, dark of eye and hair.

Even in her early teens, she was having affairs.

A shadow had been cast upon her girlhood by some time spent

into correction school because of her parents' inability to curb her will. Perhaps it was this

shadow that made her a suspicious and rebellious spirit, rebellious against people and circumstances

and conventions.

Catherine always wanted to dominate, but somehow life wouldn't let her.

In her late teens, had been born to her a baby girl, soon after her marriage to Thomas

McArdle, her first love, with whom she had associated since the time she was 13.

She and her husband lived together only three or four months at the home of the Bricles, Catherine's parents.

The husband later obtained a divorce, other men, his reason.

Catherine, however, always blamed her mother for separating

her from the man she loved. Always a live wire, Catherine did not exactly retire into seclusion

when she became a grass widow. Thomas McArdle was not the only fish in the brook. She was 27 in the full

bloom of womanhood when she met Dan Caber, an unorthodox Jew, 34 years old, and engaged in the

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