"By George!" he exclaimed.
It was a story of the elopement of Elizabeth Dow with Morgan Mason, Reid's rival. It seemed that Miss Dow and Mason met by appointment at the Monarch Inn and went from there in an automobile. The bride had written to her parents before she started, saying she preferred Mason despite his poverty. The family refused to talk of the matter. But there in facsimile was the marriage license.
Reid's face was a study as he walked back to the hotel. In a private room off the café he found Curtis, who had been drinking heavily, yet who, with the strange mood of some men, was not visibly intoxicated. Reid threw the paper down, open at the elopement announcement.
"See that," he said shortly.
Curtis read it--or glanced at it--but did not make a remark until he came to the name, the Monarch Inn. Then he looked up.
"That's where the other thing happened, isn't it?" he asked, rather thickly.
"Yes."
Curtis rambled off into something else; studiously he avoided any reference to the tragedy, yet that was the one thing which was in his mind. It was in a futile effort to forget it that he was drinking now. He talked on as a drunken man will for a time, then turned suddenly to Reid.
"I loved her," he declared suddenly, passionately. "My God!"
"Try not to think of it," Reid advised.