He looked up and beheld what any astute reader of romance will have already suspected—the woman to whom he believed he owed his ruin in San Francisco. She was as beautiful and alluring as ever, albeit she was thinner and more spiritual than he had ever seen her. She was tastefully dressed, as she had always been, a certain style of languorous silken deshabille which she was wont to affect in better health now became her paler cheek and feverishly brilliant eyes. There was the same opulence of lace and ornament, and, whether by accident or design, clasped around the slight wrist of her extended hand was a bracelet which he remembered had swept away the last dregs of his fortune.
He took her hand mechanically, yet knowing whatever rage was in his heart he had not the strength to refuse it.
“They told me it was Mrs. Merrydew,” he stammered.
“That was my mother's name,” she said, with a little laugh. “I thought you knew it. But perhaps you didn't. When I got my divorce from Dick—you didn't know that either, I suppose; it's three months ago,—I didn't care to take my maiden name again; too many people remembered it. So after the decree was made I called myself Mrs. Merrydew. You had disappeared. They said you had gone East.”
“But the clerk says you are expecting your HUSBAND on the steamer. What does this mean? Why did you tell him that?” He had so far collected himself that there was a ring of inquisition in his voice.
“Oh, I had to give him some kind of reason for my being alone when I did not find you as I expected,” she said half wearily. Then a change came over her tired face; a smile of mingled audacity and tentative coquetry lit up the small features. “Perhaps it is true; perhaps I may have a husband coming on the steamer—that depends. Sit down, Jim.”
She let his hand drop, and pointed to an armchair from which she had just risen, and sank down herself in a corner of the sofa, her thin fingers playing with and drawing themselves through the tassels of the cushion.
“You see, Jim, as soon as I was free, Louis Sylvester—you remember Louis Sylvester?—wanted to marry me, and even thought that he was the cause of Dick's divorcing me. He actually went East to settle up some property he had left him there, and he's coming on the steamer.”
“Louis Sylvester!” repeated Reddy, staring at her. “Why, he was a bigger fool than I was, and a worse man!” he added bitterly.
“I believe he was,” said the lady, smiling, “and I think he still is. But,” she added, glancing at Reddy under her light fringed lids, “you—you're regularly reformed, aren't you? You're stouter, too, and altogether more solid and commercial looking. Yet who'd have thought of your keeping a hotel or ever doing anything but speculate in wild-cat or play at draw poker. How did you drift into it? Come, tell me! I'm not Mrs. Sylvester just yet, and maybe I might like to go into the business too. You don't want a partner, do you?”