The hour of midnight was striking.
“It was a great success, my little musicale,” Mrs. Percy-Bartlett, with flushed, triumphant face, was saying to her husband as they stood in the drawing-room on his return. The evening had been a pleasant one to Percy-Bartlett, and the genial influences of his club had made him sociable.
“Come into the library, Harriet,” he said, “while I smoke just one more cigar.”
The smile on her face vanished, and lines of fatigue formed around her mouth.
“Please excuse me,” she murmured in a weary tone. “I am very tired. They encored my cradle-song so many times that—that, really, it wearied me. I fear I can’t stand success. Good-night. I’m very sorry.”
“Good-night,” he said coldly.
Then he went to the library and moodily lighted a “perfecto.” There seemed to be something lacking in his life, something that forever seemed within his grasp and forever escaped him.
CHAPTER III.
“Yes, Richard,” remarked Fenton, as the two strangely-assorted newspaper men turned into a down-town side-street to take a table d’hôte dinner at a restaurant well known to the semi-Bohemians of the city,—real Bohemians we have none, though another generation will beget them,—“yes, my boy, this is the most interesting metropolis in the world.”