“Sell my house, pay my debts and live on my own little bit of an income.”
“But, good heavens, Audrey! Chris has no right to cut off like this, and leave you. I don't know the story, but at least he must support you. A man can't just run away and evade every obligation. I think I'll have to go after him and give him a talking to.”
“No!” she said, bending forward. “Don't do that. He has had a bad scare. But he's had one decent impulse, too. Let him alone, Clay.”
She placed the money on the stand, and rose. As she faced him, she impulsively placed her hands on his shoulders.
“I wish I could tell you, Clay,” she said, in her low, slightly husky voice, “how very, very much I admire you. You're pretty much of a man, you know. And—there aren't such a lot of them.”
For an uneasy moment he thought she was going to kiss him. But she let her hands fall, and smiling faintly, led the way downstairs. Once down, however, she voiced the under lying thought in her mind.
“If he comes out, Clay, he'll never forgive me, probably. And if he is—if he doesn't, I'll never forgive myself. So I'm damned either way.”
But ten minutes later, with a man on either side of her, she was sitting at the piano with a cigaret tucked behind her ear, looking distractingly pretty and very gay and singing a slightly indecorous but very witty little French song.
Clayton Spencer, cutting in on the second rubber, wondered which of the many he knew was the real Audrey. He wondered if Chris had not married, for instance, the girl at the piano, only to find she was the woman upstairs. And he wondered, too, if that were true, why he should have had to clear out. So many men married the sort Audrey had been, in Chris's little study, only to find that after all the thing they had thought they were getting was a pose, and it was the girl at the piano after all.
He missed her, somewhat later. She was gone a full half hour, and he fancied her absence had something to do with the money she had borrowed.