Rumour knew all about him. He was drinking himself to death on the gumfields, that El Dorado of lost men.
Then after a year of silence his stories and articles and verse began to appear again as good as ever. One night a discussion of something he had written began among men sitting with her father after dinner, and the talk drifted to the man himself, and to the circumstances of his banishment, and she gathered that no one present believed the tales.
“Well, he was a damned fool not to fight it,” she heard her father say. “There’s no sense in being sensitive about things like that.”
Most of her relatives, however, banned his name from general conversation, but they had long since taken the meaning out of language for Valerie. She herself had ceased to be a lady so often that it did not disturb her to hear a man had ceased to be a gentleman. She merely wondered what fine adventure he had been up to.
And then there was her own father. He had been the most illuminating experience in her life. It seemed funny to her that Dane Barrington should be an outcast while her father sat in the seats of the mighty. Of course he had been clever enough and wealthy enough to keep out of divorce cases.
And now this strange being who had been a kind of phantom flitting in and out of her dreams for years, was here somewhere, to be actually seen in the flesh, to be encountered unawares on the roads, to give a sense of adventure to an evening stroll.
Seeing his head as it had appeared for a moment against the dusk of the trees it was hard to think he was anything but a phantom, and if it had not been for the memory of his vibrant voice, that said “I beg your pardon” over and over again in her brain, she would have thought she
