“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. “Look here, Randal,” Adrian said seriously, “you perturb me very much. You speak actually as if you are still--still sentimentally interested in this woman--another man’s wife--because you discover----” “That both she and her husband are sentimentally interested in me; ha! ha! ha!” Randal interrupted. “I could never imagine such a thing,--it perturbs me,” Adrian persisted seriously. “It perturbs me, too,” declared Randal quizzically, “to have you gadding about in my likeness, escorting other men’s wives,--the gay Lothario that you are!--and getting _me_ into the papers, the public prints. Oh, fie, fie.” “And she _is_ another man’s wife,” remonstrated Adrian. “She won’t be long if she has a spark of spirit left,” declared Randal boldly. “She will bring suit for divorce herself.” “But I doubt if she can get it,” said Adrian in dismay. The difference of mood made itself manifest in the tones of their voices--Adrian’s crisp, imperative, even tinctured with sternness, Randal’s careless, musical, drawling. “Oh, she can get it fast enough. I should think from what I observed of his manner to her she could prove enough instances of cruelty and tyranny to melt almost any trial judge.” Adrian reflected silently upon the episodes on the _Cherokee Rose_, but kept his own counsel, while the smoke curled softly above the duplicate heads.