第63章

At the moment when the Nice Boy, as brown as the proverbial berry, was playing a round of golf with Joan within sound of the sea, Howard Oldershaw, his cousin, drove up to the little house in East Sixty-fifth Street to see Martin.

He, too, had caught the sun, and his round fat face was rounder and fatter than ever.He, too, had the epitome of health, good nature, and misdirected energy.He performed a brief but very perfect double shuffle on the top step while waiting for the door to open, and then barged past the constitutionally unsurprised man servant, sang out a loud woo-hoo and blew into the library like an equinoctial gale.

Pipe in mouth, and wearing a thin silk dressing gown, Martin was standing under the portrait of his father.He slipped something quickly into his pocket and turned about.It was a photograph of Joan.

"Well, you Jack-o'-Lantern," he said."It's better late than never, I suppose."Howard sent his straw hat spinning across the room.It landed expertly in a chair."My dear chap, your note's been lying in my apartment for a week, snowed under my bills.I drove back this morning, washed the bricks out of my eyes and came right around.

What are you grumbling about?"

"I'm not grumbling.When you didn't show up in answer to my note Itelephoned, and they told me you were away.Where've you been?""Putting in a week at the Field Club at Greenwich," replied Howard, filling a large cigarette case from the nearest box, as was his most friendly habit."Two sweaters, tennis morning, noon and night, no sugar, no beer, no butter, no bread, gallons of hot water--and look at me! Martin, it's a tragedy.If I go on like this, it's me for Barnum's Circus as the world's prize pig.What's the trouble?"There was not the usual number of laughter lines round Martin's eyes, but one or two came back at the sight and sound of his exuberant friend."No trouble," he said, lying bravely."I got here the day you left and tried to find you.That's all.I wanted you to come down to Shinnecock and play golf.Everybody else seems to be at Plattsburg, and I was at a loose end.""Golf's no good to me.It wouldn't reduce me any more than playing the piano with somebody dying in the next room.Been here all the week?""Yes," said Martin.

"What? In this fug hole, with the sun shining? Out with it, Martin.

Get it off your chest, old son."

Just for an instant Martin was hugely tempted to make a clean breast of everything to this good-hearted, tempestuous person, under whose tight skin there was an uncommon amount of shrewdness.But it meant dragging Joan into open discussion, and that was all against his creed.He had inherited from his father and his father's father an absolute incapability of saying anything to anybody about his wife.

And so he slammed the door of his soul and presented an enigmatical front.

"There's nothing on my chest," he said."Business downtown has kept me here,--legal stuff and that sort of thing.But I'm free now.Got any suggestions?"Howard accepted this.If a pal was determined not to confide and get invaluable advice, what was the use of going for him with a can opener? But one good look at the face whose every expression he knew so well convinced him that something was very much the matter."Why, good Lord," he said to himself, "the old thing looks as if he'd been working night and day for an examination and had been plucked.Iwonder which of the two girls is at the back of all this,--the wife or the other?" Rumors had reached his way about both.

"What do you want to do?" he asked.