“I don’t understand French.”
“It’s in English and it’s quite worn out, as if it had been read over and over. Several of the pages are falling out.”
“Oh, I’ve read that. I just remember. It’s a rattling good story, too. About the hunchback and the gipsy girl who tells fortunes and has a pet goat. The priest, who’s a villain, falls off the steeple and clings to a gutter by his finger nails with his enemy watching him. It’s the finest kind of a story.”
“What a pity that you’ve read it! Oh, here’s one that’s evidently been a great favorite. It’s in paper and it’s all thumbed and torn. Somebody’s written across the top, ‘Of all the damned fool people——’. Oh, I beg your pardon, I read it before I realized. The name is Wife in Name Only. It doesn’t seem the kind of title that makes you want to read the book, does it?”
“‘Wife in Name Only!’” he gave a short laugh. “It certainly isn’t the kind of name that would make me want to read a book.”
“Nor me,” said a deep voice behind them.
They both turned to see Buford, the actor, standing back of the table, his tall, angular figure silhouetted against the pale oblong of the uncurtained window. He was smiling suavely, but at the same time with a sort of uneasy, assumed assurance, which suggested that he was not unused to rebuffs.
“That, certainly,” he said, “is not a name to recommend a book to any man—any man, that is, who has or ever had a wife.”
He advanced into the circle of the firelight, blandly beaming at the young man, who, leaning back in his chair, was eying him with surprised inquiry, never having seen him before. The look did not chill the friendly effusion of the actor who, approaching Dominick, said with the full, deep resonance of his remarkable voice,
“Congratulations, my dear sir, congratulations. Not alone on your recovery, but on the fact that you are here with us at all.” He held out his large hand, the skin chapped and red with the cold, and the long fingers closed with a wrenching grip on Dominick’s. “We were not sure, when you arrived among us a few nights ago, that we would have the felicity of seeing you so soon up and around—in fact, we were doubtful whether we would ever see you up and around.”