“You do look as if you wanted exercise,” commented Adams, as they left the building; “too much terrapin has put your liver wrong, I guess.”

At the corner, they passed a news-stand, and as Adams stopped for his evening paper, he noticed again the nervous agony which afflicted Perry during the brief delay.

“Look here, what’s up, now?” he enquired, holding his paper in his hand when they started on again, “are you in any trouble and can I help to get you out?  I’ll do anything you like except play the gallant, and I only draw the line at that because of my temperamental disability.  So, something is wrong?” he added gayly, “for you haven’t even observed the pretty woman ahead there in the pea-green bonnet.”

“Oh, I’m not in any mess just now,” replied Perry, with a big, affectionate shake like that of a wet Newfoundland dog.

Adams threw a keener glance at him.  “No scrape about a woman, then?” he asked, with the tolerant sympathy which had made him so beloved by his own sex.

“Oh, Lord, no,” ejaculated Perry, with a fervour too convincing to be assumed.

“And you haven’t lost in Wall Street?”

“On the other hand I made a jolly deal.”

“Well, I give it up,” remarked Adams cheerfully; then as he spoke, the glare from an electric light fell full upon the headlines of the folded paper in his hand, and he came to a halt so sudden that Perry, falling back to keep step with him, felt himself spinning like a wound up top.

“My God!” said Adams, in a voice so low that it barely reached Perry’s ears.  An instant later a quick animal passion—­the passion of the enraged male—­entered into his tone and he walked quickly across the pavement to the sheltering dusk of a cross street.  “May God damn him for this!” he cried in a hoarse whisper.

Following rapidly in his footsteps, Perry caught up behind him, and made an impulsive, nerveless clutch at the unfolded paper.  “I knew you’d see it; so I wanted to be along with you,” he said in a voice like that of a tragic schoolboy.

Adams turned to him immediately, with a restraint which had succeeded his first quivering exclamation.  “So you knew that Brady’s wife meant to sue for a divorce?” he asked.

Perry bowed his head—­in the supreme crisis of experience he had always found the simple truth to be invested with the dignity of an elaborate lie.  “I had heard it rumoured,” was what he said.

“And that my wife—­”

“I’ll swear I never believed it,” broke in Perry, with a violent assurance.

From the emotion in his voice one would have supposed him, rather than Adams, to be the injured husband; and the fact was that he probably suffered more at the instant than he had ever done in the whole course of his comfortable life.

“Well, I suppose I ought to be very much obliged to you,” replied Adams, with an agonised irony to the injustice of which Perry was perfectly indifferent, “but I can’t see that it matters much so long as the thing is true.”