Part 104

Joe brought him a cocktail.

“Drink it, old dear,” he said. “And when it's down I'll tell you a few little things about playing around with ladies who have a past. Here's to forgetting 'em.”

Leslie took the glass.

“Right-o,” he said.

He went home the following day, leaving Joe to finish the business in New York. His going rather resembled a flight. Tossing sleepless the night before, he had found what many a man had discovered before him, that his love of clandestine adventure was not as strong as his caution. He had had a shock. True, his affair with Beverly had been a formless thing, a matter of imagination and a desire to assure himself that romance, for him, was not yet dead. True, too, that he had nothing to fear from Dick Livingstone. But the encounter had brought home to him the danger of this old-new game he was playing. He was running like a frightened child.

He thought of various plans. One of them was to tell Nina the truth, take his medicine of tears and coldness, and then go to Mr. Wheeler. One was to go to Mr. Wheeler, without Nina, and make his humiliating admission. But Walter Wheeler had his own rigid ideas, was uncompromising in rectitude, and would understand as only a man could that while so far he had been only mentally unfaithful, he had been actuated by at least subconscious desire.

His own awareness of that fact made him more cautious than he need have been, perhaps more self-conscious. And he genuinely cared for Elizabeth. It was, on the whole, a generous and kindly impulse that lay behind his ultimate resolution to tell her that her desertion was both wilful and cruel.

Yet, when the time came, he found it hard to tell her. He took her for a drive one evening soon after his return, forcibly driving off Wallie Sayre to do so, and eying surreptitiously now and then her pale, rather set face. He found a quiet lane and stopped the car there, and then turned and faced her.

“How've you been, little sister, while I've been wandering the gay white way?” he asked.

“I've been all right, Leslie.”

“Not quite all right, I think. Have you ever thought, Elizabeth, that no man on earth is worth what you've been going through?”

“I'm all right, I tell you,” she said impatiently. “I'm not grieving any more. That's the truth, Les. I know now that he doesn't intend to come back, and I don't care. I never even think about him, now.”

“I see,” he said. “Well, that's that.”

But he had not counted on her intuition, and was startled to hear her say:

“Well? Go on.”

“What do you mean, go on?”

“You brought me out here to tell me something.”

“Not at all. I simply--”

“Where is he? You've seen him.”

He tried to meet her eyes, failed, cursed himself for a fool. “He's alive and well, Elizabeth. I saw him in New York.” It was a full minute before she spoke again, and then her lips were stiff and her voice strained.

“Has he gone back to her? To the actress he used to care for?”

He hesitated, but he knew he would have to go on.

“I'm going to tell you something, Elizabeth. It's not very creditable to me, but I'll have to trust you. I don't want to see you wasting your life. You've got plenty of courage and a lot of spirit. And you've got to forget him.”

He told her, and then he took her home. He was a little frightened, for there was something not like her in the way she had taken it, a sort of immobility that might, he thought, cover heartbreak. But she smiled when she thanked him, and went very calmly into the house.

That night she accepted Wallie Sayre.

XLIII

Bassett was having a visitor. He sat in his chair while that visitor ranged excitedly up and down the room, a short stout man, well dressed and with a mixture of servility and importance. The valet's first words, as he stood inside the door, had been significant.

“I should like to know, first, if I am talking to the police.”