Masterson faced his friend with a sudden blaze in his hollow eyes.
"Now, I am through with being shocked at myself, through with thinking of myself or sparing myself and other people. Can't you see, can't you guess for whom alone I would do this—or anything else? Have you forgotten Holly? I may not have a wife, but I have a son. And I will not have my son reared as I was, married as I was, and ruined as I am. I am going to have money, if I fish it out of the gutter, to take him away to some clean, far-off place. There I shall rear him myself, understand! He shall never know this Fred Masterson. Roughing it outdoors will put me in fit condition long before he is old enough to criticise. He's got a fine little body, Tony! I'll have him as hard and straight as a pine tree. I'll teach him to work. What will I care for the squalls of this corner of the world, when I have done that? Since Lucille divorced me, I've stripped my mind of a good deal of hampering romance."
He was interrupted by the exclamation of both his listeners.
"Divorced you?" Adriance echoed, stifled by the pressure of warring emotions. "Divorced you, after all?"
"You don't mean to say you didn't know?" He studied the two faces with incredulous astonishment; then, convinced by their patent honesty, shrugged derision of himself. "Conceited lot, all of us! We think if our tea-cups drop, the crash is heard around the world. Yes, I have been a single man for three months. You have been away for six, remember. But it went through very quietly. Lucille is strong for propriety and conventions. She even," his face darkened with an angry flood of bitterness startling as a self-betrayal, "she even is willing to pay pretty highly for them. Holly——"
The sentence remained unfinished. Elsie's memory returned to that morning, when Masterson told her that he had lost Holly. She glimpsed his meaning now.
The automobile had long since left behind the flash and glitter of theatrical Broadway. When the gliding silence of the progress was suddenly broken by a blast of the car's electric horn sounding warning to some late pedestrian, the three within started as if at an unnatural happening.
"It went through quietly," Masterson sullenly picked up the broken thread, "because she bargained with me. She said that if I made no defence, she would let me take Holly. Well, I kept my word; I stayed away from the whole business and didn't even get a lawyer—like a fool. I don't even know what they said about me. I didn't care, since she wanted it. And then she asked the court for the custody of Holly; and got him. It was only for the boy's good, she says; I was not fit to have charge of him."
"Oh!" Elsie gasped.
Masterson lighted a cigarette with an attempt at unconcern. He had a singular difficulty in bringing the burning match in contact with the end of the little paper tube—a lack of coordination between the nerves and muscles that held a sinister meaning for one able to interpret the signs.