Patsy looked away from him, for a long moment. Then her hand met his with the old impulsive frankness. “Yes, I will, Kent. If you care enough for Warren to come here and plead for him, I surely care enough to forgive him! Though, of course”—she weakened a little—“you’re an outsider in the affair: you can’t really see what it means to——”
“To forgive? Perhaps not,—then again, perhaps I do. You see——”
“Somebody had to forgive the woman, I suppose,” it occurred to Patsy who was intent on her own train of thought; “or not to forgive her. Oh, do you know if I were that woman’s husband, Kent, I just couldn’t forgive her—that’s all! I couldn’t. Why, think——” she broke off suddenly, looking up at him with a little laugh. “Do you know what just came into my mind, Kent?—something perfectly absurd!—that what I ought to do now, is to go beg the woman’s husband to forgive her! Then I’d have conquered my weakness as well as Warren did his, eh?” Patsy stopped abruptly; for there in the door stood Warren.
He still wore his overcoat, and his splendidly built body seemed to have hunched down into it—apathetically. “Well——?” he said, coming over and dropping into a third chair by the fire, “I suppose you’ve talked it all over?”
The big clubman, his friend, got up and began slowly to draw on one glove. “Ye-es,” he said,—and it was with the characteristic Club drawl—“we’ve talked it all over, Warren, and—it’s all right!” His ungloved hand went out to the other man; who stared at it—then up into the face above it—and finally, with a long breath, wrung it nearly off.
“Well, I must be toddling along to the Club,” added Chalmers lightly; “the boys will be missing me, you know; yes, the boys will be missing me. Good-night, Patsy, my dear” (she had gone over to the door with him, and he spoke in an undertone) “and—and don’t worry too much about that—that other person, you know. I daresay her hus—I daresay it’s all right with her, too. Good-night, Warren.”
“It is all right?” Warren asked his wife. In his tired face a little glimmer of vitality showed.
“All right!” echoed Patsy, her eyes meeting his with a something he had never seen in them before. Then, “Take this wet coat off at once, Warren Adams,” she scolded, “and those boots—you’re to go straight upstairs and change them. I declare, it’s certainly a good thing I’ve come home!—you’re worse than Junior, about your rubbers!” She was tugging at his heavy coat, but he caught her hands and drew her about, to face him.
“Yes,” he said—reverently—“it’s a very good thing you’ve come home!”
And for some reason, Patsy had to snatch her hands away and go flying up the stairs ahead of him.