“Mrs. Langham!—­Evelyn!” he exclaimed, starting back in dismay.

“Hush, Jack, you needn’t call it from the housetops!” As she spoke she swept aside her veil and he saw her face, a superlatively pretty face with scarlet smiling lips and dark luminous eyes that were smiling, too.

“Do you want to see me, Evelyn?” he asked awkwardly.

But she was neither awkward nor embarrassed; she was still smiling up into his face with reckless eyes and brilliant lips.  She pointed to the door with her small gloved hand.

“Open it, Jack!” she commanded.

For a moment he hesitated.  She was the one person he did not wish to see, least of all did he wish to see her there.  She was not nicely discreet, as he well knew.  She did many things that were not wise, that were, indeed, frankly imprudent.  But clearly they could not stand there in the hallway.  Gilmore or some of Gilmore’s friends might come up the stairs at any moment.  Langham himself might be of these.

Something of all this passed through North’s mind as he stood there hesitating.  Then he unlocked the door, and standing aside, motioned her to precede him into the room.

This room, the largest of several, he occupied, was his parlor.  On entering it he closed the door after him, and drew forward a chair for Evelyn, but he did not himself sit down, nor did he remove his overcoat.

He had known Evelyn all his life, they had played together as children; more than this, though now he would have been quite willing to forget the whole episode and even more than willing that she should forget it, there had been a time when he had moped in wretched melancholy because of what he had then considered her utter fickleness.  Shortly after this he had been sent East to college and had borne the separation with a fortitude that had rather surprised him when he recalled how bitter a thing her heartlessness had seemed.

When they met again he had found her more alluring than ever, but more devoted to her pleasures also; and then Marshall Langham had come into her life.  North had divined that the course of their love-making was far from smooth, for Langham’s temper was high and his will arbitrary, nor was he one to bear meekly the crosses she laid on him, crosses which other men had borne in smiling uncomplaint, reasoning no doubt, that it was unwise to take her favors too seriously; that as they were easily achieved they were quite as easily forfeited.  But Langham was not like the other men with whom she had amused herself.  He was not only older and more brilliant, but was giving every indication that his professional success would be solid and substantial.  Evelyn’s father had championed his cause, and in the end she had married him.

In the five years that had elapsed since then, her romance had taken its place with the accepted things of life, and she revenged herself on Langham, for what she had come to consider his unreasonable exactions, by her recklessness, by her thirst for pleasure, and above all by her extravagance.