“Oh, Ralph, what does it matter—­what can it matter?”

“Who’s the man?  Did he tell you that?” Ralph insisted.  He saw her growing agitation.  “Why can’t you answer?  Is it any one I know?”

“He was told in Paris it was his friend Raymond de Chelles.”

Ralph laughed, and his laugh sounded in his own ears like an echo of the dreary mirth with which he had filled Mr. Spragg’s office the day he had learned that Undine intended to divorce him.  But now his wrath was seasoned with a wholesome irony.  The fact of his wife’s having reached another stage in her ascent fell into its place as a part of the huge human buffoonery.

“Besides,” Laura went on, “it’s all perfect nonsense, of course.  How in the world can she have her marriage annulled?”

Ralph pondered:  this put the matter in another light.  “With a great deal of money I suppose she might.”

“Well, she certainly won’t get that from Chelles.  He’s far from rich, Charles tells me.”  Laura waited, watching him, before she risked:  “That’s what convinces me she wouldn’t have him if she could.”

Ralph shrugged.  “There may be other inducements.  But she won’t be able to manage it.”  He heard himself speaking quite collectedly.  Had Undine at last lost her power of wounding him?

Clare came in, dressed for their walk, and under Laura’s anxious eyes he picked up the newspaper and held it out with a careless:  “Look at this!”

His cousin’s glance flew down the column, and he saw the tremor of her lashes as she read.  Then she lifted her head.  “But you’ll be free!” Her face was as vivid as a flower.

“Free?  I’m free now, as far as that goes!”

“Oh, but it will go so much farther when she has another name—­when she’s a different person altogether!  Then you’ll really have Paul to yourself.”

“Paul?” Laura intervened with a nervous laugh.  “But there’s never been the least doubt about his having Paul!”

They heard the boy’s laughter on the lawn, and she went out to join him.  Ralph was still looking at his cousin.

“You’re glad, then?” came from him involuntarily; and she startled him by bursting into tears.  He bent over and kissed her on the cheek.

XXXII

Ralph, as the days passed, felt that Clare was right:  if Undine married again he would possess himself more completely, be more definitely rid of his past.  And he did not doubt that she would gain her end:  he knew her violent desires and her cold tenacity.  If she had failed to capture Van Degen it was probably because she lacked experience of that particular type of man, of his huge immediate wants and feeble vacillating purposes; most of all, because she had not yet measured the strength of the social considerations that restrained him.  It was a mistake she was not likely to repeat, and her failure had probably been a useful preliminary