"Of Holly," she answered simply. "I hope his new nurse will play with him, and cuddle him."
"The baby?" Her fidelity touched him with a warm sense of promise for his own future. "Yes, I have taken you from him. But, we left him his father."
The allusion brought a constraint. The words spoken, Adriance flushed like a woman and turned his ashamed eyes away from the girl.
"You did not take me from Holly," Elsie hurriedly corrected. "Mrs. Masterson discharged me, night before last. I was to go to-day, anyhow."
"She came to the nursery door while you were speaking to me of telling Holly the story of Maît' Raoul Galvez. You know, Holly is too much a baby to hear stories, so she understood that you meant--other things. And it seems that once you had spoken to her of that story. She--made connections. She accused me of--of flirting with her guests; of being--an improper person."
"It is all over. It does not matter, now. But that was how I knew she did not send you away. Of course she said nothing to tell me; she is too clever. But, you see I knew so much already; and when I saw she was jealous even of your speaking to me----!"
The silence continued long. Both were thinking of Lucille Masterson. As if she feared the man's thoughts, Elsie shrank away from her husband's clasp, the movement unnoticed by him. Her clear eyes clouded with doubt, a creeping chill extinguished their glow.
Adriance spoke first, breaking at once the pause and the barrier.
"Once they must have been like this--like us. She would have left Fred, left him down and out, for a new man; and she his wife!"
Disgust was in his voice, wondering contempt. He pressed his own wife hard against his side. But Elsie dragged her arms from the hold that bound them, and impulsively clasped them about his neck in her first offered caress.
"You were thinking _that_?" she cried, fiercely glad in her triumph. "Anthony, you were thinking that?"
He stooped his head to meet her glance; standing together, they looked into each other's eyes.
The man behind the wicket leaned forward to survey the man outside. The gate-keeper at the main entrance to Adriance's was the prey of a double vanity that kept his attention alert: he was vain of his own position, and of his ability to judge the positions of other men. This was his seventeenth year in the cage of ornamental iron-work, and he had brought his hobby into it with his first day there. He delighted in difficult subjects, now, who baffled a casual inspection.