."

He fell into thought.

"I doubt if she can do anything, herself. Whatever she did would come
through him in the end. You say he likes Albert?" He was silent again.
"I don't want to meet either of them--but I would about as soon meet him
as her."

I saw that he was nerving himself for another _scene a faire_. Well, it
would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, his
_flair_ for fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question and
no surrogate could serve.

Perhaps, after all, there had been nothing between those two. Anyway, in
the general eye the marriage had made everything right. She was
accepted, certainly. And as certainly he had lived down, if he had ever
possessed it, the reputation of a hapless husband.

He wrote to her in a non-committal way--a letter which left loopholes,
room for accommodation. Her reply suggested that he call at the bank;
she would pass on the word. He told me he would try to do so. I saw the
impudent concert-monger was to have his house.

And so, one forenoon, at eleven or so, Raymond, after some
self-drivings, reached the bank; by appointment, as he understood.
Through the big doors; up the wide, balustraded stairway--it was the
first time he had ever been in the place. He was well on the way to the
broad, square landing, when some lively clerks or messengers, who had
been springing along behind him, all at once slackened their pace and
began to skirt the paneled marble walls. A number of prosperous
middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact
group. It seemed as if some directors' meeting was in progress--in
progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of
the group was John W. McComas.

He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers,
had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side.
McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with
no markedness of attention.

"How do you do?" he said indifferently.

"I'm pretty well," said Raymond dispiritedly.

"And that was all!" he reported next day in a high state of indignation.
"Don't suppose I shall try it again!"

But a careless Gertrude had failed to inform her husband of the
appointment. She had been busy, or he had been away from home....

"Go once more," I counseled, I pleaded.

A note came to him from McComas--a decent, a civil. Come and talk things
over--that was its purport. He went.