“Get in,” she said holding out a hand to him.  “I’m going to take you down-town to do an errand for me—­well, two errands, really.  My, but it’s a long time since I’ve seen you!”

She didn’t look tragic, to be sure—­not as if there were livid bruises underneath her furs.  And nothing about the manner of her greeting suggested that she was on the point of sobbing out a plea to be forgiven.  Still, what did she mean by an errand?  It might be anything.

“You see,” she explained, “I happened to remember that you were going to begin studying law this year, and that you were just the person who wouldn’t mind doing what I want.”

“Divorce!” thought the half-back with a shudder.

“I want you,” she went on, “to tell me just how you begin studying law—­what text-books you get, and where you get them.  I want you to come along and pick them out for me.  You see, I’ve decided to study it myself.”

It was a fact that the half-back was enormously relieved.  But it was a brutal derisive fact—­an unescapable one.  He wasn’t heart-broken over the dashing of a suddenly raised hope.  He was, in his heart of hearts, saying, “Thank the Lord!”

If he had been pale before, he was red enough now.  He felt ridiculous and irritable.

“Your husband knows all that a great deal better than I, of course,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” Rose was thoughtless enough to admit, “but you see, I don’t want him to know.”  She flushed a little herself.  “It’s going to be a—­surprise for him,” she said.

“And, after we’ve got the books,” she went on, “I want you to do something else.  He’s making an argument in court to-day, and I want to go and hear him.  Only—­I’m so ignorant, you see, I don’t know how to do it and I didn’t want to tell him I was going.  So you’re to find out where the court room is and how to get me in.  Now, tell me all about everything and what’s been happening since I went away.  I saw you made the all-American last fall, and meant to write you a note about it, but I didn’t get a chance.  That was great!”

But even at this new angle, the talk didn’t run smoothly.  Because, precisely as the half-back forgot his terrors and the hopes that had prompted them, and the absurdity of both—­precisely as he began to feel, after all, that it was a very superb and grown-up thing to be a familiar friend of a married woman with a limousine and a respectful chauffeur, and wonderful clothes and an air of taking them all for granted—­precisely as he made up his mind to this, he became so very mature, and wise and blase, modeled his manners and his conversation so strictly on John Drew in his attempt to rise to the situation, that the schoolboy topics she suggested froze on his tongue.  So that, by the time he had picked out the books for her and seen them stowed away in the car, and then had telephoned Rodney’s office to find what court he was appearing before, and finally taken her up to the eighth floor in the Federal Building and left her there, she was, though grateful, distinctly glad to be rid of him.