The eyes of Nancy, glad with a knowing gladness, were quick for Allan’s face, resting fondly there during the seconds in which he was changing from the dead astonishment to live recognition at sight of Bernal.  During the shouts, the graspings, pokings, nudgings, the pumping of each other’s arms that followed, Nancy turned to greet Mrs. Covil, who had paused before her.

“Do sit down a moment and tell me things,” she urged, “while those boys go back there to have it out!”

Thus encouraged, Mrs. Covil dropped into a chair, seeming not loath to tell those things she had, while Nancy leaned back and listened duteously for a perfunctory ten minutes.  Her thoughts ran ahead to Allan—­and to Bernal—­as children will run little journeys ahead of a slow-moving elder.

Then suddenly something that the troubled little woman was saying fixed her attention, pulling up her wandering thoughts with a jerk.

“—­and the Doctor asked me, my dear, to treat it quite confidentially, except to bother Cyrus.  But, I’m sure he would wish you to know.  Of course it is a delicate matter—­I can readily understand, as he says, how the public would misconstrue the Doctor’s words and apply them generally—­forgetting that each case requires a different point of view.  But with Harold it is really a perfectly flagrant and dreadful case of mismating—­due entirely to the poor boy’s thoughtless chivalry—­barely twenty-eight, mind you—­as if a man nowadays knows his mind at all well before thirty-five.  Of course, divorce is an evil that, broadly speaking, threatens the sanctity of our home life—­no one understands that better than your husband—­and re-marriage after divorce is usually an outrageous scandal—­one, indeed, altogether too common—­sometimes I wonder what we’re coming to, it seems to be done so thoughtlessly—­but individual instances are different—­’exceptions prove the rule,’ you know, as the old saying goes.  Now Harold is ready to settle down, and the girl is of excellent family and all that—­quite the social and moral brace he needs, in fact.”

Nancy was attentive, yet a little puzzled.

“But—­you speak of your son, Harold—­is he not already married?”

“That’s it, my dear.  You know what a funny, bright, mischievous boy Harold is—­even a little deliciously wild at times—­doubtless you read of his marriage when it occurred—­how these newspapers do relish anything of the sort—­she was a theatrical young woman—­what they call a ‘show girl,’ I believe.  Humph!—­with reason, I must say!  Of all the egregious and inveterate showiness!  My dear, she is positively a creature!  Oh, if they’d only invent a monocle that would let a young man pierce the glamour of the footlights.  I pledge you my word, she’s—­but never mind that!  Harold was a thoughtless, restless boy—­not bad, you know, but heedless.  Why, he was quite the same about business.  He began to speculate, and of course, being brother Cyrus’s