rd the
bantering voice:

"I say--you ARE goin' grey. We're bally old, Lenny! A fellow gets old
when he marries."

And he answered:

"By the way, I never knew that YOU had been."

From Dromore's face the chaffing look went, like a candle-flame blown
out; and a coppery flush spread over it. For some seconds he did not
speak, then, jerking his head towards the picture, he muttered gruffly:

"Never had the chance of marrying, there; Nell's 'outside.'"

A sort of anger leaped in Lennan; why should Dromore speak that word as
if he were ashamed of his own daughter? Just like his sort--none so
hidebound as men-about-town! Flotsam on the tide of other men's
opinions; poor devils adrift, without the one true anchorage of their own
real feelings! And doubtful whether Dromore would be pleased, or think
him gushing, or even distrustful of his morality, he said:

"As for that, it would only make any decent man or woman nicer to her.
When is she going to let me teach her drawing?"

Dromore crossed the room, drew back the curtain of the picture, and in a
muffled voice, said:

"My God, Lenny! Life's unfair. Nell's coming killed her mother. I'd
rather it had been me--bar chaff! Women have no luck."

Lennan got up from his comfortable chair. For, startled out of the past,
the memory of that summer night, when yet another woman had no luck, was
flooding his heart with its black, inextinguishable grief. He said
quietly:

"The past IS past, old man."

Dromore drew the curtain again across the picture, and came back to the
fire. And for a full minute he stared into it.

"What am I to do with Nell? She's growing up."

"What have you done with her so far?"

"She's been at school. In the summer she goes to Ireland--I've got a bit
of an old place there. She'll be eighteen in July. I shall have to
introduce her to women, and all that. It's the devil! How? Who?"

Lennan could only murmur: "My wife, for one."

He took his leave soon after. Johnny Dromore! Bizarre guardian for that
child! Queer life she must have of it, in that bachelor's den,
surrounded by Ruff's Guides! What would become of her? Caught up by some
young spark about town; married to him, no doubt--her father would see
to the thoroughness of that, his standard of respectability was evidently
high! And after--go the way, maybe, of her mother--that poor thing in
the picture with the alluring, desperate face. Well! It was no business
of his!