Then the most delightful thing that ever happened to mortal man happened to him. Two warm palms suddenly took his face between them and two moist lips met his own.
Then she was gone.
He took his seat on the music stool, dazed, dazzled, delighted, shocked, frightened, triumphant.
The position was terrific.
Jones was no Lothario. He was a straight, plain, common-sensical man with a high respect for women, and the position of leading character in a bad French comedy was not for him. Jones would just as soon have thought of kissing another man’s wife as of standing on his head in the middle of Broadway.
To personate another man and to kiss the other man’s wife under that disguise would have seemed to him the meanest act any two-legged creature could perform.
And he had just done it. And the other man’s wife had—heu! his face still burned.
She had done it because of his deception.
He found himself suddenly face to face with the barrier that Fate had been cunningly constructing and had now placed straight before him.
There was no getting over it or under it, he would have to declare his position at once—and what a position to declare!