She turned from his darkened face to the mirror.
"You really are very selfish, Tony. Pray think a little of me instead of yourself. But I will try to do as you wish; next month, perhaps. I could go to Florida for the winter."
Adriance sat down again beside the desk and took a cigarette from a small lacquered tray that stood there. He was beaten, but he was not submissive. He bent his head to the yoke with a bitter, sick reluctance. Yet he understood that it was too late to draw out. Lucille loved him; whether intentionally or not, he had won her. No, he must finish what he had begun.
The cigarette was perfumed, and nauseated him. He dropped it into an ash-receiver, but it had given him a moment to steady himself. After all, Masterson did neglect his wife. If he could not keep his own, why should Tony Adriance turn altruist and try to do it for him? At least, Lucille might be happy.
Mrs. Masterson had touched her hat into place, surveying her vivid reflection. She was wise enough to take her triumph casually.
"Shall we go?" she questioned. "Nan Madison hates late arrivals, you know. Do make your man throw away that cravat you are wearing, Tony. Gray is not your color. It makes you look too pale; too much——"
"Like Maître Raoul Galvez?" he dryly supplied, rising.
"Who was he?"
"A man who raised the Devil. I am quite ready if you wish to go."
CHAPTER III
The Girl Outside
Tony Adriance slipped into the habit of pausing for a few words with the girl in black whenever circumstances set them opposite each other. And that was quite often, since his home was so near the pavilion she had adopted as her place of repose. He rather avoided his friends, during the days following his futile rebellion against Lucille Masterson's will, yet he was lonely and eager to escape thought. He could talk to the girl, he admitted to himself, because she did not know him.
They met with a casual frankness, the girl and he, like two men who find each other congenial, yet whose lives lie far apart. Their brief conversations were intimate without being inquisitively personal. She had a trick of saying things that lingered in the memory; at least, in his memory. Not that she was especially brilliant; her charm was her earnestness, at once vivid and tranquil, and the odd glamor of enchantment she threw over plain commonsense, making it no longer plain, but alluring as folly.
But she continued to wear the shabby little boots, with their optimistic bravery of blacking. They really were respectable boots, aging, not aged. The fault lay with Adriance, not them; he was too much accustomed to women "whose sandals delighted his eyes." If her feet had been less childishly small, they might have preoccupied him less. As it was, they preoccupied him more and more.
There is no accepted way of offering a pair of shoes to a feminine acquaintance. Nevertheless, in the third week of his friendship with the girl, Adriance bought a pair of pumps for her. He had seen them in a glass case set out before a shop and stopped to gaze, astonished. They were so unmistakably hers; the size, the rounded lines, the very arch and tilt were right! They were of shining black, with Spanish heels and glinting buckles.
He took them home with him, but of course he dared not give them to her. He had an idea that he might essay the venture on the last occasion of their meeting; if she punished him with banishment, then, it would not matter. For he meant to leave New York when Lucille went to Florida. He would spend the necessary interval between the divorce and his marriage, in Canada, alone.
Meanwhile, there was the girl.
It was on the last day of October that he found her knitting instead of embroidering; a web of gay scarlet across her knees.
"A new suit for Holly's big Teddybear," she explained, as he sat down opposite to her. "Christmas is coming, you know. I like to have all ready in advance. Don't you think the color should become a brown-plush bear?"
"It is not depressing."
"It is the color of holly. And depression is not a sensation to cultivate, is it?" She paused to gaze across the river, already shadowed by approaching evening. "I believe in fighting it off with both hands; driving a spear right through the ugly thing and holding it up like Sir Sintram with that wriggly monster in the old picture."
"You would be a good one to be in trouble with," he said abruptly.
She disentangled his meaning from the extremely vague speech, and nodded serious assent.
"Yes, perhaps. I'm used to making the most of things."
"The best of them," he corrected.
"Of course! The most best—why should anyone make more worst?"
They laughed together. But directly the restless unhappiness flowed back into his eyes.
"They do, though!" he exclaimed.
"Then they are wrong, all wrong," she said decidedly. "They should set themselves right the moment they find it out."
"But if they can't?" he urged, with a personal heat and protest. "Things aren't so simple as all that. Suppose they can't set one thing straight without knocking over a lot of others? You cannot go cutting and slashing through like that!"
"Oh, yes; you can," she contradicted, sitting very upright, her gray eyes fired. "You must; anyone must. It is cowardly to let things, crooked things, grow and grow. And one could not knock down anything worth while that easily. Good things are strong."
He shook his head. But she had stirred him so that he sat silent for a while, then rather suddenly rose to take his leave.
"You never told me your name," he remarked, looking down at her. He noticed again how supple and deft her fingers were, and their capable swiftness at the work.
"No. Why?" she replied simply.
"I don't know," he accepted the rebuke. "I—beg your pardon."
"Oh, certainly. Holly is trying to shake hands before you go."
Of course he and the baby had become friends. He carefully yielded his forefinger to the clutching hands, but he did not smile as usual.
"Look here," he spoke out brusquely. "Just as an illustration that things are not as easily kept straight as you seem to think—I know a man who somehow got to following one woman around. I don't think he knows quite how. Of course, he admired her immensely, and liked her. Well, I suppose he felt more than that! But he never even imagined making love to her, because she was married. You see, he was a fool. One day when he called, she told him that she was going to get a divorce from her husband. She has the right. And the man found she expected to marry him, afterward; she thought he had meant that all along. What could he do? What can he do?"
The baby gurgled merrily, dropping the forefinger and yawning. The girl laid down her work to tuck a coverlet about her charge.
"I do not know," she admitted, her voice low.
Adriance drew a quick breath.
"That isn't all of it. The husband is the man's friend. Why, they used to sleep together, eat together——! And he doesn't know. Don't you see, the man has to fail either the husband or wife? How can you straighten that?"
She looked up, to meet the unconscious self-betrayal of his defiant, unhappy eyes.
"I am very sorry for him," she answered gravely. And, after a moment. "She must be very clever."
He started away from the suggestion with sharp resentment. Clever—that was his father's term for Lucille Masterson; and it was hateful to him. He would not analyze why he felt that repugnance to hearing Lucille called clever. He refused to consider what that implied, what ugly depths of doubt were stirred in him to