The lights were blazing in the hall; there was evidently an unusual commotion among the servants; and as he entered, Connie’s nurse came to meet him with a white and startled face.

“Have you seen Mrs. Adams?” she asked hastily.  “She separated from me in a shop and though I searched for her for hours, I could not find her.”

For a breathless pause he stared at her in bewildered horror; then his eyes fell upon a note lying conspicuously on the hall table, and he took it up and tore it open before he answered.  The words on the paper were few, and after reading them, he folded the sheet again and replaced it in the envelope.  For an instant longer he still hesitated, swallowing down the sensation of dryness in his throat.

“She will not come back to-night,” he said quietly at last; “she has gone away for a few days.”

Then turning from the vacant curiosity in the assembled faces, he went into his study and shut himself alone in the room in which the memory of his dead child still lived.

CHAPTER VIII

“THE SMALL OLD PATH”

“Her letters of course gave her away,” observed Gerty thoughtfully, as she smoothed her long glove over her arm and looked at Laura with the brilliant cynicism which belonged to her conspicuous loveliness, “Arnold says it is always the woman’s letters, and I’m sure he ought to know.”

“Why ought he to know?” asked Laura, turning with an impatient movement from the desk at which she sat.  Her gaze hung on the soft white creases of kid that encircled Gerty’s arm, but there was an abstraction in her look which put her friend at a chilling distance.

Gerty laughed.  “Oh, I mean he’s a man of the world and they always know things.”

For an instant Laura did not respond, and during the brief silence her eyes were lifted from Gerty’s arm to Gerty’s face.  “I sometimes think his worldliness is only a big bluff,” she said at last.

“Well, I wouldn’t trust his bluff too much, that’s all,” retorted Gerty.

A smothered indignation showed for a moment in Laura’s glance.  “But how do you know so much about him?” she demanded.

“I?—­oh, I’ve had my fancy for him, who hasn’t?  He’s like one of those eclair vanille one gets at Sherry’s—­they look substantial enough on the surface, but when one sticks in the fork there’s nothing there but froth.  He’s really quite all right, you know, so long as you don’t stick in the fork.”

“But I thought you liked him!” protested Laura, pushing back her chair and rising angrily to her feet.

“I do—­I love him—­but that’s for myself, darling, not for you.”

“Do you mean me to think,” persisted Laura in a voice that was tense with horrified amazement, “that you are jealous of me?”

A long pause followed her words, for Gerty, instead of replying to the question had turned to the window and was staring out upon the bared trees in Gramercy Park.  The quiet of it for the moment was almost like the quiet of the country, and the two women who loved each other seemed suddenly divided by miles of silent misunderstanding.  Then, with a resolute movement, Gerty looked full into Laura’s face, while the light flashed upon a mist of tears that hung over her reproachful eyes.