“What!” said Hertford, in a low, contained voice, swerving a little in his gait, but otherwise apparently calm.
“O, he must have been well on to eighty, I should think,” replied the other, “though his wretched old body was cosmetized and bolstered up with the utmost care to the last. By the way—you saw him! Don’t you remember our laughing at the decrepit old dandy at the races that day when Hotspur won?—the old fellow who tried so hard to give a cheer, but couldn’t get up the voice, and who incessantly ‘wrestled with his false teeth,’ as I remember you put it? That was Etheridge. Don’t you remember him?”
“Yes,” said Hertford, coldly, “I remember him distinctly.”
A moment later, he had excused himself and returned to his hotel.
The next day, and the day after, he applied himself very closely to business, and was so successful in getting through with it, that he caught the same steamer on its return trip, and started back to St. Petersburg.
He had been gone a month, perhaps, when Mrs. Etheridge, who had been little seen by her friends, either in society, or at her own house, said abruptly one day to Tom Kennedy, to whom she had not been at home once since Hertford’s departure:
“Mr. Hertford once lived in New York—did he not?”
“O, yes—born and raised here,” was the off-hand response.
“Do you know,” she said, facing him unswervingly, though her cheeks reddened, “do you know whether he ever saw my—I mean Mr. Etheridge? Did he know him?”
“No—he never knew him, I’m sure, but he saw him once at the races. I was reminding him of it the last evening I saw him. But why do you ask?”