“Happens to be true. What’s queerer still, my dream was the means of my finding a man I owed a long score, and a heavy one, and of my paying him in full.”
“Bad for the payee!” I thought.
Paul’s face had grown terribly eloquent as he spoke those last words. On a sudden the expression of it changed—another memory was stirring in him. Wonderfully tender the fierce eyes grew; wonderfully tender the faint, sad smile, that was like sunshine on storm-scathed granite. That smile transfigured the man before me.
“Ah, poor child—poor Lucille!” I heard him mutter.
That was it, was it? So I let him be. Presently he lifted his head. If he had let himself get the least thing out of hand for a moment, he had got back his self-mastery the next.
“I’ll tell you that queer story, Bertie, if you like,” he said.
The proposition was flatteringly unusual, but the voice was quite his own.
“Somehow I’d sooner talk than think about—her,” he went on after a pause.
I nodded. He might talk about this, you see, but I couldn’t. He began with a question—an odd one:
“Did you ever hear I’d been married?”