“You can never tell when or where or under what circumstances a lost man will reappear. After today I shall make it a rule not to believe a man is dead unless I have seen him buried.”
“Why, whom on earth have you seen?” questioned Miss Van Tuyl. There was just the slightest suspicion of a tremour in her voice, and her eyes were apprehensive. The speaker, however, detected neither. He had, in fact, quite forgotten, if he had ever heard, that there had been an attachment between the man he had that day met on the terrasse of the Café de la Paix and the woman who sat at his side.
“Carey Grey, the absconder!”
The words struck her as a blow from a clenched fist. Her cheeks, which had been a trifle flushed, went suddenly white as the damask napery. Her jewelled fingers clutched the edge of the table. She felt that she was falling backward, that everything was receding, and she caught the table edge to save herself.
“Carey Grey!” repeated Nicholas Van Tuyl, in amazement. “Surely you must have been mistaken!”
“Not a bit of it. I talked to him.”
“The devil!” exclaimed Edson and then apologised.
“You’d never know him,” Frothingham went on, after emptying his champagne glass; “he has bleached his hair, and he is wearing a bleached beard, too.”
“Oh, horrible!” This from Mrs. Dickie.
“Told a most remarkable story about not knowing anything for five months; brain fever or something. I must admit he was very convincing.”