Dean Silver flung away his cigarette, and sunk his hands in his pockets.
"Certainly he's divorced," he said briefly.
Martie's heart thumped. The flowers in her hands, she stood staring away from him, unseeing.
"I hope you'll forgive me—I feel like a fool touching the thing at all," Dean Silver said, after a silence. "But I thought that there was some sort of an understanding between you."
"Oh, no!" Martie half-whispered, with a fluttered breath.
"There isn't?" he asked, in a tone of keen protest.
"Oh, no!"
The novelist whistled a few notes and shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, then, there isn't," he said philosophically. He stooped to pick a fragrant spike of mignonette, and put it in his buttonhole. When he began speaking again, he did not look at Martie. "A few of us have come to know Dryden well, this winter," he said gravely. "He's a rare fellow, Mrs. Bannister—a big man, and he's got his field to himself. You wouldn't believe me if I told you what a fuss they've been making over him—back there, and how little it matters to him. He's going a long way. You—you've got to be kind to him, my dear girl."
"I'm a Catholic, and he's a divorced man," Martie said, turning troubled eyes toward him. "I never thought of him in that way!"