“Poor, unhappy man, do you know what you are saying?” Angela murmured.
“Perfectly. I came here to say it. She means to leave me, and I mean to offer her every facility. She is dying to take a lover, and she has got an excellent one waiting for her. Bernard knows whom I mean; I don’t know whether you do. She was ready to take one three months after our marriage. It is really very good of her to have waited all this time; but I don’t think she can go more than a week or two longer. She is recommended a southern climate, and I am pretty sure that in the course of another ten days I may count upon their starting together for the shores of the Mediterranean. The shores of the Mediterranean, you know, are lovely, and I hope they will do her a world of good. As soon as they have left Paris I will let you know; and then you will of course admit that, virtually, I am free.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I suppose you are aware,” said Gordon, “that we have the advantage of being natives of a country in which marriages may be legally dissolved.”
Angela stared; then, softly—
“Are you speaking of a divorce?”
“I believe that is what they call it,” Gordon answered, gazing back at her with his densely clouded blue eyes. “The lawyers do it for you; and if she goes away with Lovelock, nothing will be more simple than for me to have it arranged.”
Angela stared, I say; and Bernard was staring, too. Then the latter, turning away, broke out into a tremendous, irrepressible laugh.
Gordon looked at him a moment; then he said to Angela, with a deeper tremor in his voice—
“He was my dearest friend.”