Her fingers sought the latch absently.
“Let me open it for you,” he said. “Were you going into town, or did you come for the walk?”
“I?” she said. “Oh, I told Jules not to come back for me—it’s a short walk home.” She smiled up at him for the first time with her old-time brightness. “And you,” she said, “you haven’t completed the round of your ‘old friends’ yet—you will come with me.”
BAS BLEU
By Anna A. Rogers
Author of “PEACE AND THE VICES”
That his wife was keeping something from him had been unpleasantly apparent to Robert Penn for over two months; but what really wore upon his easily disturbed nerves was the equally obvious fact that her secret was the source of an unusual, unnatural, unseemly happiness, which she took no pains to disguise.
Robert was the very much overworked junior partner in the prosperous law firm of Messrs. Flagg, Bentnor & Penn; and the question of his taking a much-needed rest had been gravely discussed by the other two partners more than once during the year; but the mere suggestion of it put him into such a tantrum that they let it drop, trusting to a redistribution of the work of the office to lighten somewhat Penn’s burden. So all the fashionable divorcées—hitherto Bentnor’s specialty—were turned over to the junior partner, as a slight means of professional diversion.
But he threw himself into the cases of his clients, male and female, with the same old unsparing fervor, and Flagg and Bentnor—the latter was Penn’s brother-in-law—raised their eyebrows and shook their heads behind his back.