In a moment or two Peggy looked up through a mist of tears. The room was empty.
Peggy was left alone.
CHAPTER VI
One morning upon a dull day in the late summer of the same year in which Mrs. Admaston had stayed at the Hôtel des Tuileries in Paris, Colonel Adams came down to breakfast at the Cocoa Tree Club. He ordered his grilled kidneys in the quaint, old-fashioned dining-room, with its rare sporting prints and air of sober comfort, and took up his morning paper. His eyes fell upon the cause list of the Royal Courts of Justice, and he sighed.
A few minutes afterwards Henry Passhe, whose leave from India had been extended for reasons of health, and who was also a member of the famous club in St. James's Street, entered and sat down by his friend.
"Well," he said, "do you still hold to your resolution, Adams?"
The colonel sighed, and put down his knife and fork. "I don't know, old chap," he said doubtfully. "It's different for you. You see, you don't know Mrs. Admaston. I know her quite well, and I really doubt whether it is the chivalrous thing to do, to go and stare at her, as if she was a sort of show. She'll be undergoing tortures all day, poor little thing!"
"Just as you like," Passhe answered. "I confess to great curiosity myself, and of course everyone who can possibly get in will be going, whether they are friends of Mrs. Admaston or of her husband. It's great good luck, my getting two seats like this; but don't come unless you like. I can easily find someone else who will be only too glad to drop in for an hour or two. That's all I want to do—just to see what's going on. You see it is the case of the century almost. I am not up in the statistics of this sort of thing, but I doubt if a Cabinet Minister, who is also one of the wealthiest men in England, has ever brought an action for divorce against his wife, who is not only as rich as he in her own right, but also is co-partner in one of the biggest financial houses in Europe. That's the way I look at it."
"Well, I'll come," the colonel said suddenly. "It can't do any harm, after all; and I am sure all my sympathies are with Mrs. Admaston, though of course...."