"I saw you in the crowd last night, old man," he said, looking at the floor and twisting and untwisting his fingers. "What do you think of it? A nice life for a fellow to lead, eh?"
What else could I reply than, "Why do you lead it then?"
"Why?" he repeated, breaking into a hollow, uneasy laugh. "Why, because I love her, damn me! and I deserve it all."
"Is this what you came to tell me?" I asked.
"No," he answered, "of course not. The fact is, I want you to help me out of a hole. That row last night has settled me with McGilp. He came to see me about a lot of pictures for a sale he is getting up out West, and the senora kept up such a nagging that he got sick and suggested that we should go to 'The Studio' for a chop and settle the business there. She swore I shouldn't go, and that she would follow us if I did. I thought she'd not go that far; but she did. So the McGilp affair is off for good, I know. He's disgusted, and I don't blame him. What I want of you is this. Buy that Hoguet you wanted last year."
The picture was one I had fancied and offered him a price for in his palmy days, one that he had picked up abroad. I was only too glad to take it and a couple more, for which I paid him at once; and next evening, at dinner, I heard that he had levanted. "Walked out this morning," said Smith, "and sent a messenger an hour after with word that he had already left the city. She came in to me with the letter in one hand and a dagger in the other. She swears he has run away with another woman, and says she's going to have her life, if she has to follow her around the world."
She did not carry out her sanguinary purpose, though. There were some consultations with old Dobb and then the studio was to let again. Some one told me she had returned to Cuba, where she proposed to live on the allowance her father-in-law had made her husband and which he now continued to her.
I had almost forgotten her when, several years later, in the lobby of the Academy of Music, she touched my arm with her fan. She was promenading on the arm of a handsome but beefy-looking Englishman, whom she introduced to me as her husband. I had not heard of a divorce, but I took the introduction as information that there had been one. The Englishman was a better fellow than he looked. We supped together after the opera, and I learned that he had met Mrs. Dobb in Havana, where he had spent some years in business. I found her a changed woman—a new woman, indeed, in whom I only now and then caught a glimpse of her old indolent, babyish and foolish self. She was not only prettier than ever, but she had become a sensible and clever woman. The influence of an intelligent man, who was strong enough to bend her to his ways, had developed her latent brightness and taught her to respect herself as well as him.
I met her several times after that, and at the last meeting but one she spoke of Frank for the first time. Her black eyes snapped when she uttered his name. The devil was alive in them, though love was dead.
I told her that I had heard nothing of him since his disappearance.