“Serious enough for Floyd-Rosney,” Randal laughed bluffly. “Did ever a fellow so befool himself, and call all the world to witness! Of course, I deprecate the publicity for the lady, but everybody understands the situation. It does not injure her position in the least. That is the kind of husband she wanted--and she has got him.”
“I never was so affronted in my life,” he said.
Once more Randal laughed. “I was simply enchanted,” he declared.
“Honestly, Randal, I don’t understand you,” said Adrian, holding his cigar delicately in his fingers.
“Oh, I am very simple, quite transparent, in fact.”
Adrian shook his head, restoring his cigar to his lips. “Don’t make you out, old man.”
“Because you have never been told by a lady to take foot in hand, and toddle! Discarded--rejected--despised! Therefore”--with a strong puff--“you can’t know what a keen joy it is to realize that you are still important enough to be the cause of domestic discord between husband and wife, when you haven’t seen the lady but once in five years, and then in his presence, besides, being five hundred miles away, meekly babbling about levee protection.”
“Like it? It goes to the cockles of my heart.”
“Randal, I should never have thought it of you,” said Adrian rebukingly.
“Because, kid, I am older than you and know many things that you haven’t learned. I got a little bit the start of you in life and I have kept ahead of you ever since,” Randal declared whimsically.
“I can’t comprehend how you like to be mixed up in that miserable misunderstanding.”
“Why, it flatters me to death. She couldn’t put me out of her heart, although she could and did lacerate terribly my heart. Floyd-Rosney is jealous of my very existence. But for that he would have inferred no more from seeing me, as he thought, assisting her to board the train than any incidental acquaintance tendering that courtesy. He is not disturbed that _you_ boarded the train with her.”
“You are jealous of Floyd-Rosney,” said Adrian abruptly.
Randal thrust his cigar between his lips and spoke indistinctly with this obstruction. “Not I,” he laughed. “Not under these circumstances.”
Adrian was frowning anxiously. The two faces, so alike in feature, were curiously dissimilar at the moment, the one so genially confiding, the expression of the other, alert, expectant, with a grave prophetic rebuke.