"A woman who runs away gets no alimony," said De Gollyer loudly. "Not here, not in the effete East!"
"I hadn't thought of that, either," said Lightbody, who, despite himself, could not repress a smile.
De Gollyer, irritated perhaps that he should have been duped into sympathy, ran on with a little vindictiveness.
"Of course that means nothing to you, dear boy. You were happy, ideally happy! You adored her, didn't you?"
He paused and then, receiving no reply, continued:
"But you see, if you hadn't been so devilish lucky, so seraphically happy all these years, you might find a certain humor in the situation, mightn't you? Still, look it in the face, what have you lost, what have you left? There is something in that. Fifteen thousand a year, liberty and no alimony."
The moment had come which could no longer be evaded. Lightbody rose, turned, met the lurking malice in De Gollyer's eyes with the blank indecision screen of his own, and, turning on his heel, went to a little closet in the wall, and bore back a decanter and glasses.
"This is not what we serve on the table," he said irrelevantly. "It's whisky."
De Gollyer poured out his drink and looked at Lightbody en connoisseur.
"You've gone off—old—six years. You were the smartest of the old crowd, too. You certainly have gone off."