The silence continued long. Both were thinking of Lucille Masterson. As if she feared the man's thoughts, Elsie shrank away from her husband's clasp, the movement unnoticed by him. Her clear eyes clouded with doubt, a creeping chill extinguished their glow.
Adriance spoke first, breaking at once the pause and the barrier.
"Once they must have been like this—like us. She would have left Fred, left him down and out, for a new man; and she his wife!"
Disgust was in his voice, wondering contempt. He pressed his own wife hard against his side. But Elsie dragged her arms from the hold that bound them, and impulsively clasped them about his neck in her first offered caress.
"You were thinking that?" she cried, fiercely glad in her triumph. "Anthony, you were thinking that?"
He stooped his head to meet her glance; standing together, they looked into each other's eyes.
CHAPTER VIII
Andy of the Motor-Trucks.
The man behind the wicket leaned forward to survey the man outside. The gate-keeper at the main entrance to Adriance's was the prey of a double vanity that kept his attention alert: he was vain of his own position, and of his ability to judge the positions of other men. This was his seventeenth year in the cage of ornamental iron-work, and he had brought his hobby into it with his first day there. He delighted in difficult subjects, now, who baffled a casual inspection.
It was, therefore, with an air of bored certainty that he classified this morning visitor at a glance, and settled back on his high stool.