had at last found herself skating gingerly over a veritable sleet of
scandal. She got herself rumoured about so persistently that from being
merely improbable, she had become, in Gerty's words again, "one of the
very last of the impossibilities." And of late Adams' friends had begun
to ask themselves quite seriously, "why in the deuce he didn't keep a
hand upon his wife." How much he knew or how much there was, in reality,
to know had become in a limited circle almost the question of the hour,
until Perry Bridewell had demanded in final exasperation "whether Adams
was ridiculously ignorant or outrageously indifferent?"

But if the curious had been permitted to observe the object of their
uncertainty as he stood under the full glare before his festive wife
they would have found neither ignorance nor indifference in his manner.
He regarded her with a frank, fatherly tolerance, in which there was
hardly a suggestion of a more passionate concern.

"Wrap up well," he said, as his glance shot over her, "there's a biting
wind outside."

Connie screwed up her delicate eyebrows and the fine little wrinkles
leaped instantly into view. There was a nervous irritation in her look,
which recoiled from her husband as from a blank and shining wall.

"I'm dining at Sherry's with the Donaldsons," she explained. "I knew you
wouldn't come, so I didn't even trouble you to decline."

"You're right, my dear," he rejoined gayly.

"Mr. Brady has called for me," she went on with the faintest possible
hesitation in her voice, "and as we're all going to the theatre