"I'm hanged if I am! I never was so up against it in my life. Perhaps if I cleared off abroad somewhere for a year . . ."
Feathers interrupted quietly:
"Don't you think you've been away long enough already?"
"You mean Scotland! Pooh! That was nothing. She wouldn't have cared about that." But his voice was uncertain, and after a moment he asked suspiciously:
"What are you driving at?"
"Nothing. But I think, as I thought at the time, that it would have saved a lot of trouble if you had taken her with you. You were newly married. It would have been a most natural thing to do."
Chris colored, but he did not feel at all resentful. He was grateful to Feathers for his interest. It was a relief to be able to tell his troubles to somebody.
"I don't think it made any difference," he said after a moment. "It's not as if ours was an ordinary sort of marriage. I mean——" He broke off in confusion, to blunder on again: "Marie doesn't care for me, and that's the whole truth. I thought she did once upon a 217 time. It shows my darned conceit, I suppose."
Feathers said nothing, and, struck by his silence, Chris said with slow deliberation: "Sometimes, now and again, I've wondered if there isn't some other fellow she cares for—some chap she would marry if I wasn't in the way."
He was looking hard at Feathers all the time he spoke, and his friend's ugly face was at the moment mercilessly exposed to the glare of the electric light, but there was no change in its quiet indifference, and Chris gave a sharp sigh of relief.