Joe whistled softly.

“That’s not the point,” Leslie declaimed, in a truculent voice.  “I’m not defending myself.  She’s a friend; I’ve got a right to call there if I want to.”

“Sure you have,” soothed Joe.

“Well, you know the situation at home, and who Livingstone actually is.  The point is that, while that poor kid at home is sitting around killing herself with grief, Clark’s gone back to her.  To Beverly Carlysle.”

“How do you know?”

“Know?  I saw him this afternoon, at her house.”

He sat still, moodily reviewing the situation.  His thoughts were a chaotic and unpleasant mixture of jealousy, fear of Nina, anxiety over Elizabeth, and the sense of a lost romantic adventure.  After a while he got up.

“She’s a nice kid,” he said.  “I’m fond of her.  And I don’t know what to do.”

Suddenly Joe grinned.

“I see,” he said.  “And you can’t tell her, or the family, where you saw him!”

“Not without raising the deuce of a row.”

He began, automatically, to dress for dinner.  Joe moved around the room, rang for a waiter, ordered orange juice and ice, and produced a bottle of gin from his bag.  Leslie did not hear him, nor the later preparation of the cocktails.  He was reflecting bitterly on the fact that a man who married built himself a wall against romance, a wall, compounded of his own new sense of responsibility, of family ties, and fear.

Joe brought him a cocktail.

“Drink it, old dear,” he said.  “And when it’s down I’ll tell you a few little things about playing around with ladies who have a past.  Here’s to forgetting ’em.”

Leslie took the glass.

“Right-o,” he said.

He went home the following day, leaving Joe to finish the business in New York.  His going rather resembled a flight.  Tossing sleepless the night before, he had found what many a man had discovered before him, that his love of clandestine adventure was not as strong as his caution.  He had had a shock.  True, his affair with Beverly had been a formless thing, a matter of imagination and a desire to assure himself that romance, for him, was not yet dead.  True, too, that he had nothing to fear from Dick Livingstone.  But the encounter had brought home to him the danger of this old-new game he was playing.  He was running like a frightened child.

He thought of various plans.  One of them was to tell Nina the truth, take his medicine of tears and coldness, and then go to Mr. Wheeler.  One was to go to Mr. Wheeler, without Nina, and make his humiliating admission.  But Walter Wheeler had his own rigid ideas, was uncompromising in rectitude, and would understand as only a man could that while so far he had been only mentally unfaithful, he had been actuated by at least subconscious desire.

His own awareness of that fact made him more cautious than he need have been, perhaps more self-conscious.  And he genuinely cared for Elizabeth.  It was, on the whole, a generous and kindly impulse that lay behind his ultimate resolution to tell her that her desertion was both wilful and cruel.