"Have you—have you heard anything of Marion Shaw? I—I m-mean Mrs. Westervelt? Is she well and—and happy?"
Brown chewed his cigar for a moment before he responded:
"That is just what I hoped you might want to talk about when we came out here by ourselves, Ashley. I didn't want to open the subject, you know. Yes, I saw her just before she sailed for Italy two months ago. She went alone, old man. Westervelt's a beast. I don't know what she went through with him, but they've made a clean break of it for good. She didn't confide in me to any extent. But we talked old times, and after a while, well, she asked me about you, and I had nothing to tell her. I didn't even know where you were. And—hem—she wasn't looking at me at all, and she wasn't even talking to me when she said as if she were thinking out loud:
"'I'm so lonely. Oh, if I could see him just once!'"
Brainard leaned over the railing and stared into the troubled sea as he almost whispered:
"Is she going to get a—get a——"
"Yes, after waiting two years. Then she'll be free to——"
"And you're going to the Mediterranean in the spring?" muttered Brainard. "God, if I could only see her! Two years, you say? If I could only see her!"
Brown laid an arm across his chum's big shoulder and said coaxingly:
"You don't want to meet any of these girls to-night, do you? We'll have a good old talk in my rooms later, and I'll have you booked for my cruise before we part company. There's a gilded temple of chance back here on the lagoon where the little ball rolls round and round, and I have a strong hunch that the luck is running to the black, and also dallying with my pet numbers, fourteen-seventeen-twenty down the middle row. Let's amble over and see what's doing in the roulette mart."