He had deliberately pushed aside the sign and walked into the forbidden grounds. Somewhat to his surprise, for he hardly knew himself how it would be taken, he found his friend walking by his side.
Mr. De Jarnette flipped the ash from his cigar and then answered composedly, "I have got over it so entirely that the sight of her causes no more commotion in my breast than the vision of the scrub lady who daily puts the outer hall in order. I hope you are wasting no sympathy upon me. I haven't even any bitterness about it,—and certainly no regret. It has simply left me with more knowledge of women. That is all. And that is worth all it cost. It is what has rendered me immune all these years. 'A burnt child,' you know."
An expression of curious relief came into the physician's face.
"Do you know, Dick, I have always had a lingering ghost of a fear—now that she is a widow—and it would be possible, don't you know, that—"
"Bah-h! I beg you will not do me the injustice of the thought. Do you know, Semple, the incomprehensible thing about it now to me is that I should ever have wasted love upon her. I have asked myself a hundred times what it was I thought I loved and where it had gone. That is where the sting of it comes in. It isn't that she should have thrown me over for the old man and his millions,—but that I shouldn't have known from the first that she wasn't—oh, well! It is over. It is just exactly with me as though it had never been, except—"
"Except—"
"—that I am wiser."
"But not better," thought the physician. "The trouble about these things is that they never leave a man the same. Something is always burned out of him." Aloud he said, "She is only one woman, Dick. A man always has a mother."
Richard De Jarnette's face softened less than one would suppose.
"My mother was but a name to me," he said. "She died in giving me birth. I have—"