Eight months had passed since they had met, and time had not been kind to him. He looked very old, she thought, and his red hair was sown with grey. A fine man physically, he had lost flesh, and his clothes bagged upon his arms and chest. One characteristic remained—the evil of a face which had expressed little but evil since his childhood.
"Well," he said—and he had never been famous for his eloquence—"well, Lil, you didn't expect to see me, I suppose. Rather an unpleasant surprise for you, isn't it?"
She took off her furs and laid them upon a chair. The room had become insufferably hot, and she would have opened the window had he not barred the way. But all her instinct forbade her to approach him, and she had need of her courage that he might not see her trembling.
"What do you want of me?" she rejoined in a cold voice—and then: "Why do you come here?"
He liked the idea of it, and leaning back in the chair, laughed as though it were the drollest of notions.
"A man comes to see his wife, and she doesn't offer him the tips of her beautiful fingers! 'Pon my word, Lil, you look splendid when you stand like that—and since you press me, I will take a whisky-and-soda and a cigar just for luck."
She ignored the request and advancing a little nearer to him, repeated the question:
"Why do you come to me? Was it not understood that you should not come; was not that part of the bargain?"
He shrugged his shoulders, but his face flushed none the less.
"Bargain be d——d! I'm in a hole—nine thousand four hundred pounds with Bothand and Co.—you remember them? I bought your emeralds there. Well, they talk of fraud and all that sort of stuff. I'll have to pay them, Lil—it's jail if I don't."