Buford raised his eyes and looked piercingly into the young man’s face. Dominick forgot the time, his engagement, Berny’s anticipated entrance. He drew himself up in his chair and said in a loud, astonished voice,
“Last night? Then the woman you saw here last night was your wife?”
The actor gravely inclined his head.
“I saw my wife,” he said solemnly, “last night at Deledda’s restaurant. It was entirely by accident. I liked the Mexican cooking and had been more than once to that place. Last night I was about to enter the back part of the restaurant when I saw her sitting there alone in the corner. For a moment I could not believe my eyes. I got behind a lace curtain and watched her. She was changed but it was she. I heard her speak to the waiter and if I’d never seen her face I’d have known the voice among a thousand. She’d grown stouter and I think even prettier, and she looked as if she were prosperous. She was well-dressed and her hands were covered with rings. When she went out I followed her and she came straight here from the restaurant and rang the bell and came in.”
“Are you sure she didn’t go into one of the other flats? There are four in the building.”
“No, she came in here. I compared the number on the transom with the address you’d given me on the card.”
“What an extraordinary thing!” said Dominick. “It’s evidently some one my wife knows who came to see her that evening, probably to keep her company while I was out. But I can’t think who it could be.”
He tried to run over in his mind which one of Berny’s acquaintances the description might fit and could think of no one. Probably it was some friend of her working-girl days, who had dropped out of her life and now, guided by Fate had unexpectedly reappeared.
“It’s certainly a remarkable coincidence,” he went on, “that she should have come to this flat, one of the few places in the city where you know the people. If she’d gone to any of the others——”
A ring at the bell stopped him.