He was highly elated when the end of a week found him calling her familiarly "Roselle," when he could walk the deck with her after breakfast, and join her party for bridge in the afternoons, and withdraw to a warm corner of the saloon with her after dinner, there to become better acquainted. He was at last, he said to himself, loosening those domestic chains which had hobbled him, and was doing more as other men did. She gulled him into thinking her clever; all she said and did and looked excited him; she was so different from the women whom men of his class married and with whom only they became intimate; a fellow on two hundred a year with a wife and family could not afford the society of the stage. But a fellow with three hundred a year and any commission his smartness could make, all just for mere pocket-money, was in a different boat altogether. The sums he staked at bridge with Roselle and her party on those winter afternoons in mid-Atlantic used to keep the household at No. 30, Welham Mansions for a week. Sometimes he won and sometimes he lost; but either seemed to him immaterial in this new lightness of his heart. He was to be in New York two months, and she was to be there three months. She used to say reckless things to him which stirred the blood. Thus: "You and I, Osborn"--he knew, of course, that familiarity with Christian names was a trait of the stage--"have met, and presently we shall part; and what was the good of meeting if this dear little friendship is just to be packed up with our luggage?" "You can pack up mine, and I'll pack up yours," he said softly. "That's a sweet way of putting it; you're one of those light-hearted people who don't mind saying goodbyes." "I say, Roselle, do you?" "Saying good-bye to fellow-souls is always sad." On the windy deck she used to wear a dark purple velvet hat slouched down and pinned close against her darker hair. It showed up the whiteness of her face, which even the saltwinds could not whip into colour, under the coating of white cosmetic almost imperceptibly laid on. Osborn loved that hat, as he loved the graceful tilt of her skirt and the fragility of her blouses; and sometimes it occurred to him to question why men's wives couldn't wear things like that. One sunny afternoon they had, when, instead of playing bridge, they sat in a sheltered corner on deck and talked. "Where are you putting up in New York?" she asked that afternoon. "At the Waldorf Astoria." "Are you really?" she said, and she thought in her shallow mind that he must be very well off indeed. Osborn did not tell her that his firm sent him to an expensive hotel for their own ends; it was pleasant to have her thinking what she did. He asked if he might call upon her in New York; if she'd have supper with him sometimes; come for a run in his two-seater which he was taking over with him. They made a dozen plans which, after all, could not hurt Marie, and the prospects of which were charming to a degree.