"It is!—but we'll have to go to the Emerson dinner!" Burgoyne stipulated.
Again silence. Presently Burgoyne spoke—a trifle low.
"I see Harry Lorraine is here—how does he take it?"
"You mean the loss of his wife? Like a ninny. He has backed and filled until he has lost all sympathy. One day he thinks he will, the next day he thinks he won't. Either he should have got a gun and chased Amherst to the ends of the earth and shot the life out of him, or he should instantly have filed his suit for divorce. To my mind, he has only one course open now—to take her back and let by-gones be by-gones—if she will take him."
Burgoyne glanced at the other thoughtfully. Rumor had it that Pendleton himself was very fond of Stephanie Mourraille before she married Harry Lorraine; but rumor often lied, and he had not been here to verify it himself. He knew that she was a handsome, dashing woman, somewhat self-willed and given to having her own way, but amenable to influence and altogether lovable. When he went away Lorraine was crazy about her and the courtship was at its height. A little later, while he was in Europe, he got cards to their marriage. Then suddenly, after a year and a half, a friend's letter told him, inter alia, that Stephanie Lorraine had run off with Garret Amherst—a man twice her age, and with a wife and four children—and that they were supposed to have gone to India. Four months ago he had encountered them in Paris—at the Café Laurent in the Champs Elysées; but when he started over to speak to them, they got up hurriedly and changed their table for one in a remote corner, so he took the hint and did not recognize them.
"What in the devil possessed her?" he asked. "Amherst is not particularly attractive."
"No—at least he is not attractive to the men—but they say he is the devil among the women, in a quiet way. I reckon it was his reputation that first caught Stephanie. After that he played her and—landed her. I didn't think, however, he would completely lose his head and run away with her."
"Amherst always struck me as exceedingly cool and calculating," Burgoyne observed.—"Still, one can never tell what love will do!"
"Love!" exclaimed Pendleton. "I wouldn't dignify it by any such name. Call it what it was!"