He went in, duty done, to an aldermanic dinner.  He passed a very successful evening.  Actually, only on the eve of his mission, he sold a Runaway car to a fat merchant prince who dined opposite to him; or at least he went as near to the actual selling as it was possible to go in the circumstances.  He recommended him to their Liverpool agent, wrote a personal letter, gave his card and received one in return, and parted from his probable client with a feeling that the transaction was going through.

He was off at daybreak next morning.

A stupendous piece of luck befell him on board.  They were only two days out when he found that a well-known theatrical management was taking a play, with the entire London cast, to New York.  It was only on the second day, when, looking across the dining saloon, he saw a raven head on the top of a rather full neck and high shoulders, and met the gay and luring glance which he had met once before, to his secret thrill, across the Royal Red, on the night when he dined there with his wife to celebrate her birthday.

Osborn was a free man; he had broken routine and was out adventuring; and he was goodlooking, he looked worth while.  She was a rather stupid actress, with no magnetism but her looks, and no possible chance of ever in this world obtaining a bigger part than the minor one she at present had inveigled from the manager; and she liked well-set-up smart men, men who appeared as if they had money to burn.  There were no obstacles placed in Osborn’s way.

He was highly elated when the end of a week found him calling her familiarly “Roselle,” when he could walk the deck with her after breakfast, and join her party for bridge in the afternoons, and withdraw to a warm corner of the saloon with her after dinner, there to become better acquainted.  He was at last, he said to himself, loosening those domestic chains which had hobbled him, and was doing more as other men did.

She gulled him into thinking her clever; all she said and did and looked excited him; she was so different from the women whom men of his class married and with whom only they became intimate; a fellow on two hundred a year with a wife and family could not afford the society of the stage.  But a fellow with three hundred a year and any commission his smartness could make, all just for mere pocket-money, was in a different boat altogether.  The sums he staked at bridge with Roselle and her party on those winter afternoons in mid-Atlantic used to keep the household at No. 30, Welham Mansions for a week.  Sometimes he won and sometimes he lost; but either seemed to him immaterial in this new lightness of his heart.

He was to be in New York two months, and she was to be there three months.

She used to say reckless things to him which stirred the blood.  Thus:  “You and I, Osborn”—­he knew, of course, that familiarity with Christian names was a trait of the stage—­“have met, and presently we shall part; and what was the good of meeting if this dear little friendship is just to be packed up with our luggage?”