Flattered by his evident disappointment, she became high and careless in her triumph.  “Oh, yes,—­but that’s all changed.  Ralph and the boy are going, but I sail on Saturday to join some friends in Paris—­and later I may do some motoring in Switzerland an Italy.”

She laughed a little in the mere enjoyment of putting her plans into words and Moffatt laughed too, but with an edge of sarcasm.

“I see—­I see:  everything’s changed, as you say, and your husband can blow you off to the trip.  Well, I hope you’ll have a first-class time.”

Their glances crossed again, and something in his cool scrutiny impelled Undine to say, with a burst of candour:  “If I do, you know, I shall owe it all to you!”

“Well, I always told you I meant to act white by you,” he answered.

They walked on in silence, and presently he began again in his usual joking strain:  “See what one of the Apex girls has been up to?”

Apex was too remote for her to understand the reference, and he went on:  “Why, Millard Binch’s wife—­Indiana Frusk that was.  Didn’t you see in the papers that Indiana’d fixed it up with James J. Rolliver to marry her?  They say it was easy enough squaring Millard Binch—­you’d know it would be—­but it cost Roliver near a million to mislay Mrs. R. and the children.  Well, Indiana’s pulled it off, anyhow; she always was a bright girl.  But she never came up to you.”

“Oh—­” she stammered with a laugh, astonished and agitated by his news.  Indiana Frusk and Rolliver!  It showed how easily the thing could be done.  If only her father had listened to her!  If a girl like Indiana Frusk could gain her end so easily, what might not Undine have accomplished?  She knew Moffatt was right in saying that Indiana had never come up to her...She wondered how the marriage would strike Van Degen...

She signalled to a cab and they walked toward it without speaking.  Undine was recalling with intensity that one of Indiana’s shoulders was higher than the other, and that people in Apex had thought her lucky to catch Millard Binch, the druggist’s clerk, when Undine herself had cast him off after a lingering engagement.  And now Indiana Frusk was to be Mrs. James J. Rolliver!

Undine got into the cab and bent forward to take little Paul.

Moffatt lowered his charge with exaggerated care, and a “Steady there, steady,” that made the child laugh; then, stooping over, he put a kiss on Paul’s lips before handing him over to his mother.

XIX

“The Parisian Diamond Company—­Anglo-American branch.”

Charles Bowen, seated, one rainy evening of the Paris season, in a corner of the great Nouveau Luxe restaurant, was lazily trying to resolve his impressions of the scene into the phrases of a letter to his old friend Mrs. Henley Fairford.

The long habit of unwritten communion with this lady—­in no way conditioned by the short rare letters they actually exchanged—­usually caused his notations, in absence, to fall into such terms when the subject was of a kind to strike an answering flash from her.  And who but Mrs. Fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the seemingly solid scene before him rested?