Something of this confidence the play-boy tried to pass on to Jean; and he could see that while she caught at it eagerly there was always a shadow in the dark eyes when Philip was mentioned. Bromley knew what was behind the shadow: it was the fear that she had once put into words—that the prisoner of reproach would end by taking some step which could never be retraced—that would put him once for all beyond the hope of redemption and reinstatement. Wise in his generation, the play-boy knew that there might be such a step; knew, also, that a man of Philip’s temper and resolution would be precisely the one to take it if the expiatory urge should drive him far enough and hard enough.
In these talks with Jean his heart went soft with pity for her. It was plain enough now that she had let herself go as far on the road to love for Philip as Philip’s prideful self-repression had permitted her to go; and at such times he would have given anything he possessed to be able to comfort her. So far as he might, with the Eugenia Follansbee entanglement still tacitly binding him, he did what he could. On the opening night at the new opera house, upon the building and furnishing of which a princely fortune had been lavished, he had all the Dabneys as his guests; and thereafter, whenever he could persuade Jean to go out, he took her and Mysie.
It was on one of these theater nights, when Mysie, now in her final year in the University preparatory school, and with lessons to prepare for the next day, had failed him, that he discovered that his and Jean’s seats were in the same row with those of Stephen Drew, the judge and his wife and Eugenia. Since a guilty conscience needs no accuser, he was not slow to interpret Eugenia’s appraisive scrutiny of his companion during the entr’actes; and when, in the dispersal after the play, despite his best efforts to dodge the Follansbee party in the outgoing crush, he found himself and Jean jammed with Drew and Eugenia in the aisle, he was not wholly unprepared for what followed.
“Introduce me,” was the whispered command from the statuesque beauty upon Drew’s arm; and he obeyed, with such formality as the informal conditions would sanction. Then: “Harry has been neglecting us shamefully of late, Miss Dabney. Can’t you persuade him to be a little more neighborly with his old friends?”
Bromley scarcely heard Jean’s murmured reply. He made sure that the beauty’s conventional protest and query were merely another command, and one which he dare not ignore. Eugenia meant to have it out with him. There was to be no more dallying and delaying.
With this discomforting thought in his mind the short walk over to West Denver was begun in silence; and it might have so continued and ended if Jean had not opened the floodgates by asking a simple and most natural question.
“Who is Miss Follansbee, Harry?”
It struck him as a piece of disloyalty of a sort that he had never mentioned the Follansbees by name to her, though he had often spoken of his friends from Philadelphia.
“What did you think of her?” he evaded.
“I think she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”