"I usually am with my dinner companion. One's hostess is to be considered. Oh—I remember—he was telling me some very amusing gossip, although he teased me into fearing he wouldn't. Now, if you are going to dance this hesitation with me you had better whirl me off. It is Mr. Thornton's, and I see him coming."
Ruyler did not see Doremus until supper was half over and then the young man entered the dining-room hurriedly, his usually serene brow lowering and his lips set. He walked directly up to Hélène.
"Beastly luck!" he exclaimed. "Hello, Ruyler. Didn't know you honored parties any more. I had to break away to meet the Overland train—beastly thing was late, of course. Then I had to take them to five hotels before I could settle them. They had two beastly little dogs and the hotels wouldn't take them in and they wouldn't give up the dogs. Some one ought to set up a high-class dog hotel. Sure it would pay. But you'll give me the first after supper, won't you?"
Hélène gave him a casual smile that was a poor reward for his elaborate apology. "So sorry," she said with the sweet distant manner in which she disposed of bores and climbers, "but Mr. Ruyler and I are both tired. We are going home directly after supper."
CHAPTER VI
I
On the following day at six o'clock Ruyler went to Long's to meet Jake Spaulding. By a supreme effort of will he had put his private affairs out of his mind and concentrated on the business details which demanded the most highly trained of his faculties. But now he felt relaxed, almost languid, as he walked along Montgomery Street toward the rendezvous. He met no one he knew. The historic Montgomery Street, once the center of the city's life, was almost deserted, but half rebuilt. He could saunter and think undisturbed.
What was he to hear? And what bearing would it be found to have on his wife's conduct?
He had gone to sleep last night as sure as a man may be of anything that his wife was no more interested in Doremus than in any other of the young men who found time to dance attendance upon idle, bored, but virtuous wives.
If the man knew her secret and were endeavoring to exact blackmail he would pay his price with joy—after thrashing him, for he would have sacrificed the half of his fortune never to experience again not only the demoralizing attack of jealous madness of the night before, which had brought in its wake the uneasy doubt if civilization were as far advanced as he had fondly imagined, but the sensation of amazed contempt which had swept over him at the dinner table as he had seen his wife, whom he had believed to be a woman of instinctive taste and fastidiousness, manifestly upon intimate terms with a creature who should have been walking on four legs. Better, perhaps, the desire to kill a woman than to despise her—