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The alert mind of Thayre, grasping the situation, addressed itself to averting its awkwardness with artless and inconsequential small talk. He came over to the table and shook hands, while Len Haswell stood at his elbow, saying nothing. Paul instinctively offered his hand, but Len ignored it.
Len Haswell carried a stricken face about the clubs where once he had been the center of jovial gatherings, when he appeared there which was not often. Old associates who read the signs avoided him out of kindliness save those who like Thayre could be with him without reminding him of his hurt.
He plays rotten bridge, but he still has a brain in his old head." "I suppose as far as that goes," commented Mr. Kirk, fortified by the entry of a new disputant into the argument, "that even Nero had his attractive angles of personality." Thayre laughed and lighted a cigarette. Then as he inhaled deeply he nodded and replied. "I hold no brief for Nero, but I dare say he was a bit misunderstood."
The needle makes for such languidness at times between its moments of dreaming and its moments of jumping nerves. Several men in evening-dress and fur coats surrounded him, and he knew them all. The face of Norvil Thayre was laughing into his, and he recognized that an evening well started had painted its flush on the cheeks of each of them. "My word, Burton!" laughed the Englishman.
He was a striking man with a lower jaw which thrust itself aggressively forward and a single white lock over his forehead, though except for that the blackness of his hair bore no touch of gray even at the temples. "I hate the lot of them!" he announced vehemently. "I hate this upstart Cyclops and his conscienceless power. I hate the pampered brother but Thayre is right.
His clothing escaped the extremes of fashion by the narrowest margin of good taste, and his mustache ends bristled up toward the laughing wrinkles about his wide-awake eyes like exclamation points of alertness. "And," went on Mr. Thayre amiably, "if he hungers for solitude I'm the last chap in the world to intrude on his meditations.
She looked sadly at him and shook her dark head until he hated himself for not assuring her that she would not have to "go to work," yet he could say nothing. Then as they sat there in an embarrassed silence, the tall figure of Len Haswell appeared in the door and the many mirrors of the wall panels multiplied him into a seeming army of giants. With him was Norvil Thayre.
Because it was a club chiefly dedicated to the elder generation Thayre came infrequently and it surprised him to find the other there. The big man was sitting with an unread paper on his knee and his eyes were brooding as he gazed out through the Fifth-avenue window on the twilight tide of motors and 'buses and hansoms that passed in an endless and unresting flow.
"Who's the dead man?" demanded the officer bluntly, and when Thayre replied with two words, "Paul Burton," he gave a long, low whistle of astonishment. The name of Burton was not yet forgotten in New York. Mary Burton was returning from a Sixth-avenue delicatessen shop with the bottle of milk and box of crackers which constituted the marketing for tomorrow morning's breakfast.
"Thank you," he said gravely, "I'm afraid I can't. Your party is made up and and " But as he stammered to a pause Thayre slapped him heartily on the back, and the others, with voices of more advanced inebriety, made it a chorus of insistence. "'Twill do you no harm, my lad," declared the Englishman. "'A little nonsense now and then You know the old saw.
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