"You do look as if you wanted exercise," commented Adams, as they left the building; "too much terrapin has put your liver wrong, I guess."
At the corner, they passed a news-stand, and as Adams stopped for his evening paper, he noticed again the nervous agony which afflicted Perry during the brief delay.
"Look here, what's up, now?" he enquired, holding his paper in his hand when they started on again, "are you in any trouble and can I help to get you out? I'll do anything you like except play the gallant, and I only draw the line at that because of my temperamental disability. So, something is wrong?" he added gayly, "for you haven't even observed the pretty woman ahead there in the pea-green bonnet."
"Oh, I'm not in any mess just now," replied Perry, with a big, affectionate shake like that of a wet Newfoundland dog.
Adams threw a keener glance at him. "No scrape about a woman, then?" he asked, with the tolerant sympathy which had made him so beloved by his own sex.
"Oh, Lord, no," ejaculated Perry, with a fervour too convincing to be assumed.
"And you haven't lost in Wall Street?"
"On the other hand I made a jolly deal."
"Well, I give it up," remarked Adams cheerfully; then as he spoke, the glare from an electric light fell full upon the headlines of the folded paper in his hand, and he came to a halt so sudden that Perry, falling back to keep step with him, felt himself spinning like a wound up top.
"My God!" said Adams, in a voice so low that it barely reached Perry's ears. An instant later a quick animal passion—the passion of the enraged male—entered into his tone and he walked quickly across the pavement to the sheltering dusk of a cross street. "May God damn him for this!" he cried in a hoarse whisper.