“So you haven’t forgotten me in six months, Arnold,” she said, with a sweetness in which there was an almost imperceptible tone of bitterness.

He took her hand in both of his, pressing it for an instant in a quick muscular grasp which had in it something of the nervous vigor that lent a peculiar vibrant quality to his voice.

“And I couldn’t have done it in six years,” he replied, as a singularly charming smile illumined his forcible rather than regular features, and brought out the genial irony in his expressive light gray eyes.  “If I’d gone to Europe to forget you it would have been time thrown away, but I had something better on my hands than that—­I’ve been buying French racing automobiles—­”

As he finished he gave an impatient jerk to the carriage door, a movement which, like all his gestures, sprang from the nervous energy that found its outlet in the magnetism of his personality.  People sometimes said that he resembled Perry Bridewell, who was, in fact, his distant cousin, but the likeness consisted solely in a certain evident possession of virile power—­a quality which women are accustomed to describe as masculine.  He was not tall, and yet he gave an impression of bigness; away from him one invariably thought of him as of unusual proportions, but, standing by his side, he was found to be hardly above the ordinary height.  The development of his closely knit figure, the splendid breadth of his chest and shoulders, the slight projection of his heavy brows and the almost brutal strength of his jaw and chin, all combined to emphasise that appearance of ardent vitality which has appealed so strongly to the imagination of women.  Seen in repose there was a faint suggestion of cruelty in the lines of his mouth under his short brown moustache, but this instead of detracting from the charm he exercised only threw into greater relief the genial brightness of his smile.

Now Gerty, glancing up at him, remembered a little curiously, the whispered reason for his long absence.  There was always a woman in the wind when it blew rumours of Kemper, though he was generally considered to regard the sex with the blithe indifference of a man to whom feminine favour has come easily.  How easily Gerty had sometimes wondered, though she had hardly ventured so much as a dim surmise.  Ten years, she would have said, was a considerable period from which to date a passion, and she remembered now that ten years ago Kemper had secured a divorce from his wife in some Western court.  There had been no particular scandal, no damning charges on either side; and a club wit had remarked at the time that the only possible ground for a separation was the fact that Mrs. Kemper had grown jealous of her husband’s after-dinner cigar.  Since then other and varied rumours had reached Gerty’s ears, until finally there had blown a veritable gale concerning a certain Madame Alta, who sang melting soprano parts in Italian opera.  Then this, too, had passed, and, with the short memory of city livers, Gerty had forgotten alike the gossip and the heroines of the gossip, until she noted now the lines of deeper harassment in Kemper’s face.  These coming so suddenly after six months of Europe caused her to wonder if the affair with the prima donna had been really an entanglement of the heart.