Had this man got hold of his wife's secret?

But this merely sequacious thought was promptly routed. The young man,

who was undeniably good looking and was rumored to possess a certain cold

charm for women--although, to be sure, the wary San Francisco heiress had

so far been impervious to it--was now leaning over Mrs. Price Ruyler with

a coaxing possessive air, and the appeal left Helene's eyes as she smiled

coquettishly and began to talk with her usual animation; but still in a

tone that was little more than a murmur.

She moved her shoulder closer to the man she evidently was bent upon

fascinating, and her long eyelashes swept up and down while her black

eyes flashed and her pink color deepened.

There was a faint amusement mixed with Doremus' habitual air of amiable

deference, and somewhat more of assurance, but he was as absorbed as

Helene and had no eyes for Janet Maynard, on his left, whose fortune ran

into millions.

For a moment Ruyler, who had kept his nerve through several years of

racking strain which, even an American is seldom called upon to survive,

wondered if he were losing his mind. To business and all its fluctuations

and even abnormalities, he had been bred; there was probably no condition

possible in the world of finance and commerce which could shatter his

self-possession, cloud his mental processes. But his personal life had

been singularly free of storms. Even his emotional upheaval, when he had

fallen completely in love for the first time, had lacked that torment of

uncertainty which might have played a certain havoc, for a time, with

those quick unalterable decisions of the business hour; and even his

engagement had only lasted a month.

It was true that during the past six months he had worried off and on

about the shadow that had fallen upon his wife's spirits and affected his

own, but, when he had had time to think of it, before yesterday morning,

he had assumed it was due to some phase of feminine psychology which he

had never mastered. That she could be interested in another man never had

crossed his mind, in spite of his passing flare of jealousy. She was

still passionately in love with, him, for all her vagaries--or so he had

thought-Ruyler was conscious of a riotous confusion of mind that really made him

apprehensive. Had he witnessed that scene on the dummy--this

afternoon?--it seemed a long while ago--had he heard those portentous

words of his mother-in-law to his wife?--had they meant that she had

warned her daughter against the bad blood in her veins, extracted a

promise--broken!--to walk in the narrow way of the dutiful

wife--mercifully spared by a fortunate marriage the terrible temptations

of the older woman's youth? Had Helene confessed ... in desperate need of

help, advice? ... Doremus was just the bounder to compromise a woman and

then blackmail her.... Good God! What was it?




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