“Then you think it is the same old trouble that worries him?” said Barker in an awed and sympathetic voice.
“I believe it is,” said Stacy, with an equal feeling. Mrs. Barker pricked up her pretty ears; her husband's ready sympathy was familiar enough; but that this cold, practical Stacy should be moved at anything piqued her curiosity.
“And you believe that he has never got over it?” continued Barker.
“He had one chance, but he threw it away,” said Stacy energetically. “If, instead of going off to Europe by himself to brood over it, he had joined me in business, he'd have been another man.”
“What dreadful secret is this about Demorest?” said Mrs. Barker petulantly. “Is he ill?”
Both men were silent by their old common instinct. But it was Stacy who said “No” in a way that put any further questioning at an end, and Barker was grateful and for the moment disloyal to his Kitty.
It was with delight that Mrs. Barker had seen that the attention of the next table was directed to them, and that even Mrs. Horncastle had glanced from time to time at Stacy. But she was not prepared for the evident equal effect that Mrs. Horncastle had created upon Stacy. His cold face warmed, his critical eye softened; he asked her name. Mrs. Barker was voluble, prejudiced, and, it seemed, misinformed.
“I know it all,” said Stacy, with didactic emphasis. “Her husband was as bad as they make them. When her life had become intolerable WITH HIM, he tried to make it shameful WITHOUT HIM by abandoning her. She could get a divorce a dozen times over, but she won't.”
“I suppose that's what makes her so very attractive to gentlemen,” said Mrs. Barker ironically.
“I have never seen her before,” continued Stacy, with business precision, “although I and two other men are guardians of her property, and have saved it from the clutches of her husband. They told me she was handsome--and so she is.”
Pleased with the sudden human weakness of Stacy, Barker glanced at his wife for sympathy. But she was looking studiously another way, and the young husband's eyes, still full of his gratification, fell upon Mrs. Horncastle's. She looked away with a bright color. Whereupon the sanguine Barker--perfectly convinced that she returned Stacy's admiration--was seized with one of his old boyish dreams of the future, and saw Stacy happily united to her, and was only recalled to the dinner before him by its end. Then Stacy duly promenaded the great saloon with Mrs. Barker on his arm, visited the baby in her apartments, and took an easy leave. But he grasped Barker's hand before parting in quite his old fashion, and said, “Come to lunch with me at the bank any day, and we'll talk of Phil Demorest,” and left Barker as happy as if the appointment were to confer the favor he had that morning refused. But Mrs. Barker, who had overheard, was more dubious.