diet in his Lexington Avenue boarding house. He hated Ellen. He had hated her from the moment she had stepped through the door of the apartment, so cool and arrogant, so sure of herself. But he was too wise to betray his feeling save in subtle gibes at her and references to the jolly old days that were passed. He was lost now in the obscenities of a boarding house, a nobody treated scornfully even by the old aunts in Yonkers who looked upon him still as an anemic little boy with Fauntleroy curls playing among the iron dogs and deers of their front lawn.
And no one, of course, knew that Mr. Wyck, wrapped in his shabby overcoat, sometimes walked the streets after dark in the neighborhood of Riverside Drive, the gale from the North River piercing his bones, his pale eyes upturned toward the pleasant light that beamed from the top floor of the Babylon Arms.
One night nearly two years after they were married, Clarence asked, "What do you hear from your cousin?"
And Ellen, who had been playing all the evening, turned and asked, "What cousin?"
"Miss Shane."
"Oh, Lily!" And a shadow settled on her face as if the mention of Lily's name suddenly aroused memories which she had been striving to forget. "Oh, Lily!" she repeated. "I haven't heard from her in weeks. She never writes. You know she is indolent. . . . When I last heard from her she was all right. She wrote from Nice."
Clarence kept silent for a moment. "Nice must be a beautiful place. A man from the office was there last year, our foreign agent. Nice and Monte Carlo. I guess they're quite close together."
"She has a house there. It's called the Villa Blanche."
