Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/228

 dinner in a suite at the Biltmore, a week after Con and she had been married, under such head-lines as these:

I had not been invited to the wedding. I should probably never have been invited to the dinner either, if I had not happened to encounter Lady Flora under the porte-cochère of the Biltmore after their secret was in all the papers. "We intended to start at once for California," she apologized, "or I should have called you up. You must have dinner with us. Con will be so glad to see you."

I suspected that Con would be about as glad to see me as to see the coal-proprietor from Leedy Street, and my suspicion was accurate. He was entirely polite, at his ease, and unselfconscious, but he scarcely looked at me. He kept his eyes almost constantly on his wife. He talked to me, as it were, through her. And he gave me the strangest impression of a complete withdrawal of interest, not only from me, but from all the outer world from which I came.