“I understand, Mr. Kerns.  I’m awfully sorry.”

“Don’t feel sorry; only, if you can, call Jack off.  He’s been perfectly possessed to marry me to somebody ever since he married you.  And if I told him why I don’t care to consider the matter he wouldn’t believe me—­he’d spend his life in trying to bring me around.  Besides, I couldn’t ever tell him about—­Marjorie Manners.  Anyhow, nothing on earth could ever induce me to look at her again. . . .  You say she is now a widow?”

“Yes, Mr. Kerns, and very beautiful.”

“Never again,” muttered Kerns.  “Never!  She was homely enough when I asked her to marry me.  I don’t want to see her; I don’t want to know what she looks like.  I’m glad she has changed so I wouldn’t recognize her, for that means the end of it all—­the final elimination of the girl I remember on the ship. . . .  It was probably a sort of diseased infatuation, wasn’t it, Mrs. Gatewood?  Think of it!  A few days on shipboard and—­and I asked her to marry me! . . .  I don’t blame her, after all, for letting me dangle.  It was an excellent opportunity for her to study a rare species of idiot.  She was justified and I am satisfied.  Only, do call Jack off with a hint or two.”

“I shall try,” said young Mrs. Gatewood thoughtfully—­very thoughtfully, for already every atom and fiber of her femininity was aroused in behalf of these two estranged young people whom Providence certainly had not meant to put asunder.

CHAPTER XII

“Nothing,” said Gatewood firmly, “can make me believe that Kerns ought not to marry somebody; and I’m never going to let up on him until he does.  I’ll bet I could fix him for life if I called in the Tracer to help me.  Isn’t it extraordinary how Kerns has kept out of it all these years?”

The attractive girl beside him turned her face once more so that her clear, sweet eyes were directly in line with his.

“It is extraordinary,” she said seriously.  “I think you ought to drop in at the club some day when you can corner him and bully him.”

“I don’t want to go to the club,” said the infatuated man.

“Why, dear?”

He looked straight at her and she flushed prettily, while a tint of color touched his own face.  Which was very nice of him.  So she didn’t say what she was going to say—­that it would be perhaps better for them both if he practiced on her an artistic absence now and then.  Younger in years, she was more mature than he.  She knew.  But she was too much in love with him to salt their ambrosia with common sense or suggest economy in their use of the nectar bottle.

However, the gods attend to that, and she knew they would, and she let them.  So one balmy evening late in May, when the new moon’s ghost floated through the upper haze, and the golden Diana above Manhattan turned flame color, and the electric lights began to glimmer along Fifth Avenue, and the first faint scent of the young summer freshened the foliage in square and park, Kerns, stopping at the club for a moment, found Gatewood seated at the same window they both were wont to haunt in earlier and more flippant days.