"Where?"
She looked at him out of her deep eyes, and said slowly:—
"Do you wish me to tell you?"
And after a moment, as if her husband was not there and she were looking through him at something beyond, she went on into the children's room. Pole, steadying himself by the hand-rail, descended the stairs.
He no longer existed, even as a convention, for his wife.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER XLIII
Isabelle had not succeeded in bringing Vickers home with her that first time she had gone abroad. They had had a very pleasant month in the Dolomites, and he had taken her to Paris to join the Woodyards, with whom she returned. Whenever she had spoken to Vickers of coming home he had smiled and made a little joke. Once he said, "Not yet,—I cannot go yet, Belle," and she understood that it was "that beast of a woman," as she called Mrs. Conry, who kept him. She wanted to say to him, "Well, Vick, if you won't leave her, why don't you marry her then!" But gentle as her brother was to her, she did not like to touch on that topic.
She had meant to go over the next spring, but the new house was under way then. A year later a letter from Fosdick, who was returning from Russia by the way of Venice, made her start for Europe at once.
… "Madam," Fosdick wrote, "having sucked our Vickers dry, has left him at last, I am happy to say. Gone off with a fresh orange. Vick doesn't realize his luck,—he's plain dazed. Before the other orange becomes dry, it is our simple duty—yours and mine—to remove the stranded hero out of reach. I think you can do it now…. I forgot to say that the Conry left with him a pledge of her return in the shape of a lump of a girl, her daughter by Conry. Vick seems idiotically tied to this little Conry…. Oh, it is a shame, a shame!"