Page:Barbour--Peggy in the rain.djvu/189

 would look—perhaps to Peggy herself—as though he were ashamed of her, ashamed of the attachment. No, the thing must be done decently, openly. After all, he was doing only what a dozen men in his set were doing, and doing with the tacit consent of society. These plans for the future kept him occupied through the first two days. On Thursday, so impatient was he to see the fulfillment of them, that he started house-hunting. And late in the afternoon he found what he wanted, a three-story dwelling in one of the Fifties, just around the corner from the Avenue, an English basement house with a white marble front that had been rebuilt by a Western millionaire two years before and later abandoned as being two modest. The price was high, but Gordon was beyond thoughts of price. He instructed his broker to take an option on it, and went down to his club well satisfied.

Peter Waring dropped in presently from an afternoon affair of some sort, where he had somewhat disregarded his doctor's instructions and imbibed far from wisely. Gordon listened for a while to his maunderings and then took him home.