Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1920 - Feb 1921)

In the Heart of a Fool The tangled threads of many lives weave a story well worth reading. By Lee D. Brown '-i'iiiii: iiiii'iiii! Jiii::iiiiii!:;i!;iiiiiiiiiiiii;iiiii]iiiiiiiniiii'iiiiiii':;:!iiiiii'jii IT'S queer how an insignificant little nudge on the part of destiny will upset the most carefully constructed of our houses of cards. And to destiny, the most solid of our man-made houses are but houses of cards, such as a child would build. It's queer, too, how many different life patterns a single little, seemingly insignificant little incident may affect. The fact that a man or woman, now a stranger to you, decided to get off the train at River City instead of Amityville yesterday afternoon may alter the entire course of your life, or mine. An attractive young woman with smooth, blond hair, innocent blue eyes, and tailored costume as modest as the uniform of a Red Cross nurse, happened to be sent to teach in the public school of the thriving Kansas town called Harvey. She looked like an ideal selection for the job — like the sort of a girl who, on receiving her first position, would forthwith settle down as a prim and proper schoolmistress for life. But, by one of those eternal ironies of fate, there raced under her assuring exterior the sort of spirit that should have gone with dark, alluring eyes instead of blue ones, with the costume of the Lorelei rather than the tailored suit of the school-teacher; and in the mind behind the baby-blue eyes there was more ambition than moral code. Her arrival in the Kansns town was the seemingly insignificant little incident that brought out the hidden things in the heart of a certain fool, who didn't know that he was a fool and would have been the last to dream it. To this young woman, whose name was as reassuring as her general outward appearance — plain, straight forward Margaret Muller the name was — occurred the happy thought of going to the local newspaper office for information as to where she could rent a room. In which there was more of the hidden hand of destiny. Had she asked the superintendent of public schools, for instance. But she went to the local newspaper office. "Why, my child," motherly Mary Adams instinctively answered when she heard the clear-eyed girl's request, "we have a spare room at home. Why not take it?" And she glanced up at her husband, Amos, for assent. That gray-haired old gentleman owned and edited the paper. He nodded absent-mindedly, being in the middle of an editorial which demanded most of his attention, and Grant Adams, their son, looked up for only a moment and then returned to the proof sheets on which he was working. It was not indifference to loveliness on his part — it was because he was busy, and he was already in love, very madly, very happily in love, and with a girl who was considered the most at The Lorelei was not asked to the tractive of the town's party — but she was waiting younger set. for Grant when he came home. "A wide-awake, progressive little city," the new school-teacher mused to herself after supper that night at the Adams house. "I think I'll adopt this town. • Let's see — that means getting into its social bluebook by the easiest route, doesn't it? Hm-m-m." Whereupon she meditated upon certain things she had adroitly drawn out in conversation with other persons during the afternoon, when she had made her first visit to the school. It was generally understood, she had learned, that big, boyish Grant Adams, who had the rugged features of a young Abe Lincoln and