They played ball until bedtime. He sat beside the cot in the dusk, a lonely, bereft man, until the little one, who was mystified and tearful, fell asleep. When he went downstairs the paper was still spread out stiffly on the oak table. He picked it up and read again--the one paragraph on the whole sheet. “Adeline, wife of James Pray.” * * * * * That very night Murphy and I and Carrie Dark were dining in his rooms--that set which had known Adeline, which later on was to know James Pray. Carrie was sixteen, a little girl in a sweet shop--one of those shops where they put nothing but billows of silk and fondants in the window. Murphy was middle-aged--with a wide margin. I should have said fifty-five, but he only owned up to forty. That was one of his contemptible tricks; he was just like a woman. The things we love and look for in a woman are contemptible in a man. He was what I should call a pretty chap--all regular features, pink cheeks, and pouting lip. Men disliked him, but he was a tremendous favorite with women. His influence over them was quite uncanny. Carrie was nervous; she had never been in an Inn before. She evidently considered Murphy, with his stale stories of the aristocracy and his brag about his elder brother’s place in Kerry, very magnificent. She wasn’t a country girl, you see, and consequently lacked the rustic stolidity which sometimes passes for dignity. She caught up the newspaper while she waited for her fish, and when she saw the notice of Adeline’s death she gave a youthful giggle. “I shouldn’t like to go through life with a name like that,” she said derisively, with a not over-clean forefinger on that short word PRAY. Murphy was pouring sherry into her glass. The waiter--we had ordered the dinner from across the way--came in. “Like what?” asked Murphy, smiling at her paternally. “Pray!” She tossed her head and giggled again, and then she read the notice aloud. You should have seen Murphy’s face! A strange silence like a pall settled over the table; to me the news seemed to creep round those silent walls which had reflected Adeline’s shadow so often. It was the effect of Murphy’s frozen expression. But a man cannot live with a dead woman, especially when she belonged to someone else. I touched Carrie’s foot under the table. She was too young and pretty for a fossil like Murphy. He had snatched the paper from her and was reading the notice for himself. “Who was she?” demanded the girl, with the freedom of her class toward a chance admirer. “A lady I knew,” Murphy told her curtly. Carrie flushed. She resented the word--in these days of universal ladyhood. She was affronted. She was wishing that she had gone straight home from the shop to Battersea as usual, instead of being taken in Murphy’s toils at the corner of the Circus. Her round, childish face grew sulky. The evening was quite spoiled by this stupid dead woman.