“The only thing I know against her,” said one of the men with a laugh as he went by, “is that she dines alone with Brady If you see nothing in that beyond the simple act of dining—­”

Reaching a corner they turned off abruptly down a cross street and the rest of the sentence passed with the speaker into an obscurity of fog.  For an instant it did not occur to Adams to connect the phrase with an allusion to his wife; then as he repeated it mechanically in his thoughts, there sprang upon him, like some sinister outward visitation, an indefinable horror—­a presentiment which he dared not whisper even to himself.  Pshaw! there were perhaps, a dozen women who dined with Brady, he insisted reassuringly, and for the matter of that, there were probably a dozen Bradys.  The name was common enough, and the only decent thing to do was to get rid of the suspicion and to apologise to Connie in his thoughts.  To impute a low motive to a simple action had always seemed to him the vulgarity of littleness, and littleness in a man he had come to look upon as a kind of passive vice.  So until the event proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be no “black bats” among his thoughts.  Had he loved Connie there might have been perhaps more passion and less conscience in his treatment of the situation, but the humour of the philosopher had for many years replaced in his nature the ardour of the lover.  What he gave to her was the inflexible code of honour which he observed in his association with his own sex.

At Fortieth Street he was about to turn back again when he was arrested by the sound of his own name called by a passing voice, and looking up he saw Perry Bridewell spring from a cab which had hastily driven up to the sidewalk.

“Wait a bit, will you, Adams?” said Perry, waving one heavily gloved hand while he reached up with the other to pay the driver.  “You’re the very man I’m after,” he added an instant later as he turned from the curbing, “so if you don’t mind I’ll walk a couple of blocks in your direction.  I’d just got into my dinner clothes,” he explained, fastening his fur-lined overcoat more snugly across his chest, “when I found that Miss Wilde was going down alone to Gramercy Park.  That’s where I’ve come from, and now I’m rushing back to keep an engagement Gerty has made for dinner.  I’ll be hanged if I know where she’s taking me—­it’s all one to me, half the time I forget to ask whose house we’re going to until I bolt into the drawing-room.  Beastly life, this everlasting eating in other people’s houses.”

His tone was one of amiable discontentment, but there was a look of positive annoyance upon his handsome face, and he turned presently to regard his companion with an enquiry which might have been darkly furtive had not the luminous publicity in which he moved rendered the smallest of his mental processes so brilliantly overt.  It was immediately plain to Adams that the jerky sentences were shot out at random in order