“Thank you, Mr. Waythorn.  It’s been an anxious time for me.”

“Ah, well, that’s past.  Soon she’ll be able to go to you.”  Waythorn nodded and passed out.

In his own room, he flung himself down with a groan.  He hated the womanish sensibility which made him suffer so acutely from the grotesque chances of life.  He had known when he married that his wife’s former husbands were both living, and that amid the multiplied contacts of modern existence there were a thousand chances to one that he would run against one or the other, yet he found himself as much disturbed by his brief encounter with Haskett as though the law had not obligingly removed all difficulties in the way of their meeting.

Waythorn sprang up and began to pace the room nervously.  He had not suffered half so much from his two meetings with Varick.  It was Haskett’s presence in his own house that made the situation so intolerable.  He stood still, hearing steps in the passage.

“This way, please,” he heard the nurse say.  Haskett was being taken upstairs, then:  not a corner of the house but was open to him.  Waythorn dropped into another chair, staring vaguely ahead of him.  On his dressing-table stood a photograph of Alice, taken when he had first known her.  She was Alice Varick then—­how fine and exquisite he had thought her!  Those were Varick’s pearls about her neck.  At Waythorn’s instance they had been returned before her marriage.  Had Haskett ever given her any trinkets—­and what had become of them, Waythorn wondered?  He realized suddenly that he knew very little of Haskett’s past or present situation; but from the man’s appearance and manner of speech he could reconstruct with curious precision the surroundings of Alice’s first marriage.  And it startled him to think that she had, in the background of her life, a phase of existence so different from anything with which he had connected her.  Varick, whatever his faults, was a gentleman, in the conventional, traditional sense of the term:  the sense which at that moment seemed, oddly enough, to have most meaning to Waythorn.  He and Varick had the same social habits, spoke the same language, understood the same allusions.  But this other man...it was grotesquely uppermost in Waythorn’s mind that Haskett had worn a made-up tie attached with an elastic.  Why should that ridiculous detail symbolize the whole man?  Waythorn was exasperated by his own paltriness, but the fact of the tie expanded, forced itself on him, became as it were the key to Alice’s past.  He could see her, as Mrs. Haskett, sitting in a “front parlor” furnished in plush, with a pianola, and a copy of “Ben Hur” on the centre-table.  He could see her going to the theatre with Haskett—­or perhaps even to a “Church Sociable”—­she in a “picture hat” and Haskett in a black frock-coat, a little creased, with the made-up tie on an elastic.  On the way home they would stop and look at the illuminated shop-windows, lingering