He spent the next day with lawyers, absorbed in business affairs. In the evening he went to the theater, where he saw the woman he loved surrounded by a gay party. But she looked at him, as he passed, with a look that thrilled to his heart’s core, and all through the play he was happy in the sense that she thought of him, and even furtively watched him. Coming out, he met Tom Kennedy, who walked along the street with him, beginning at once to speak of Mrs. Etheridge. Hertford, with a certain reluctance, asked some question about Mr. Etheridge. He felt jealous of the man, and at the same time, sorry for him. He inquired how long he had been dead. “O, three years, or such a matter. She’s only just come back into the gay world. No one can say she did not play her part with propriety. It was even more than could have been expected from a girl of twenty, to go into such long retirement for a husband four times her age.” “What!” said Hertford, in a low, contained voice, swerving a little in his gait, but otherwise apparently calm. “O, he must have been well on to eighty, I should think,” replied the other, “though his wretched old body was cosmetized and bolstered up with the utmost care to the last. By the way--you saw him! Don’t you remember our laughing at the decrepit old dandy at the races that day when Hotspur won?--the old fellow who tried so hard to give a cheer, but couldn’t get up the voice, and who incessantly ‘wrestled with his false teeth,’ as I remember you put it? That was Etheridge. Don’t you remember him?” “Yes,” said Hertford, coldly, “I remember him distinctly.” A moment later, he had excused himself and returned to his hotel. The next day, and the day after, he applied himself very closely to business, and was so successful in getting through with it, that he caught the same steamer on its return trip, and started back to St. Petersburg. He had been gone a month, perhaps, when Mrs. Etheridge, who had been little seen by her friends, either in society, or at her own house, said abruptly one day to Tom Kennedy, to whom she had not been at home once since Hertford’s departure: “Mr. Hertford once lived in New York--did he not?” “O, yes--born and raised here,” was the off-hand response. “Do you know,” she said, facing him unswervingly, though her cheeks reddened, “do you know whether he ever saw my--I mean Mr. Etheridge? Did he know him?” “No--he never knew him, I’m sure, but he saw him once at the races. I was reminding him of it the last evening I saw him. But why do you ask?” “I merely wondered if they ever met,” she answered, carelessly. “I never heard my husband speak of him.” She said the word out boldly this time. “No--I fancy not,” said Kennedy. “They were not friends at all. In fact, Hertford had no idea he was the man you had married, until I told him.” Kennedy was a little dull, and he wondered now, why in the world she was interesting herself in such a trivial matter.