"Croyden?" he said; "isn't that an unusual name?" He appeared to be puzzling over it. "I seem to remember a town somewhere by that name."
"In New York," I told him. I was on the point of telling him how Sarah came by it, but an impulse of discretion saved me. I had seen "The Futurist" so many times now, that, once at the theatre, I occupied myself with looking at the audience and took no sort of notice of my escort until after Sarah's entrance near the close of the first act.
"Well?" I laid myself open to compliments for my friend. I was startled by what I saw when I looked at him. He had shrunk away into the corner of his seat farthest from me, like a man whose garment had fallen from him unawares. The stark naked soul of him fed visibly upon her bodily perfection; Sarah's beauty took men like that sometimes when they were able to see it—there were those who thought her merely nice-looking. I could see his tongue moving about stealthily to wet his dry lips. I couldn't bear to look at him like that; it seemed a pitiful thing for a man to ache so with the beauty of a woman he had long ceased to deserve; it was as though he had laid bare some secret ache in me.
Coming out of the theatre he surprised me with a knowledge of Sarah's affairs. He knew that she had begun with O'Farrell.
"I played with him myself," he admitted; "that was before Miss—Miss——"
"Croyden," I supplied; "that was the town she came from; I shouldn't have told you except that you seem to know."
"I was expecting another name. Wasn't she—wasn't she married once? A fellow by the name of Lawrence."
"Oh, well, you may call it married. He was a cur."
"You can't tell me anything about him worse than I know myself." From the earnestness of his tone I judged that he had suffered something at the hands of Lawrence. "But I'll say this for him, he didn't stay with the other woman; she followed him and found him, but he wouldn't stay with her."
"I don't see that that proves anything except that he was the greater scoundrel. The other woman was his wife."