“What do you call making a fool of myself?” truculently.
“You aren’t a suitor, are you? An accepted suitor?” unruffled, rather kindly.
“No, but I would to heaven that I were!” Abbott jammed the newspaper into his pocket and slung the stool over his arm. “Come on over to the studio until I get some money.”
“You are really going to start a search?”
“I really am. I’d start one just as quickly for you, if I heard that you had vanished under mysterious circumstances.”
“I believe you honestly would.”
“You are an old misanthrope. I hope some woman puts the hook into you some day. Where did you pick up the grouch? Some of your dusky princesses give you the go-by?”
“You, too, Abby?”
“Oh, rot! Of course I never believed any of that twaddle. Only, I’ve got a sore head to-day. If you knew Nora as well as I do, you’d understand.”
Courtlandt walked on a little ahead of the artist, who looked up and down the athletic form, admiringly. Sometimes he loved the man, sometimes he hated him. He marched through tragedy and comedy and thrilling adventure with no more concern that he evinced in striding through these gardens. Nearly every one had heard of his exploits; but who among them knew anything of the real man, so adroitly hidden under unruffled externals? That there was a man he did not know, hiding deep down within those powerful shoulders, he had not the least doubt. He himself possessed the quick mobile temperament of the artist, and he could penetrate but not understand the poise assumed with such careless ease by his friend. Dutch blood had something to do with it, and there was breeding, but there was something more than these: he was a reversion, perhaps, to the type of man which had made the rovers of the Lowlands feared on land and sea, now hemmed in by convention, hampered by the barriers of progress, and striving futilely to find an outlet for his peculiar energies. One bit of knowledge gratified him; he stood nearer to Courtlandt than any other man. He had known the adventurer as a boy, and long separations had in nowise impaired the foundations of this friendship.