“If you continue in that heartless strain, I shall go into the house,” Mrs. Charteris protested.

Her indignation was exaggerated, but it was not altogether feigned; women cannot quite pardon a rejected suitor who marries and is content.  They wish him all imaginable happiness and prosperity, of course; and they are honestly interested in his welfare; but it seems unexpectedly callous in him.  And besides his wife is so perfectly commonplace.

Mrs. Charteris, therefore, added, with emphasis:  “I am really disgracefully happy.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Musgrave, placidly.  “So am I.”

“Oh, Rudolph, Rudolph, you are hopeless!” she sighed.  “And you used to make such a nice lover!”

Mrs. Charteris looked out over the river, which was like melting gold, and for a moment was silent.

“I was frightfully in love with you, Rudolph,” she said, as half in wonder.  “After—­after that horrible time when my parents forced us to behave rationally, I wept—­oh, I must have wept deluges!  I firmly intended to pine away to an early grave.  And that second time I liked you too, but then—­there was Jack, you see.”

“H’m!” said Colonel Musgrave; “yes, I see.”

“I want you to continue to be friends with Jack,” she went on, and her face lighted up, and her voice grew tender.  “He has the artistic temperament, and naturally that makes him sensitive, and a trifle irritable at times.  It takes so little to upset him, you see, for he feels so acutely what he calls the discords of life.  I think most men are jealous of his talents; so they call him selfish and finicky and conceited.  He isn’t really, you know.  Only, he can’t help feeling a little superior to the majority of men, and his artistic temperament leads him to magnify the lesser mishaps of life—­such as the steak being overdone, or missing a train.  Oh, really, a thing like that worries him as much as the loss of a fortune, or a death in the family, would upset anyone else.  Jack says there are no such things as trifles in a harmonious and well-proportioned life, and I suppose that’s true to men of genius.  Of course, I am rather a Philistine, and I grate on him at times—­that is, I used to, but he says I have improved wonderfully.  And so we are ridiculously happy, Jack and I.”

Musgrave cast about vainly for an appropriate speech.  Then he compromised with his conscience, and said:  “Your husband is a very clever man.”

“Isn’t he?” She had flushed for pleasure at hearing him praised.  Oh, yes, Anne loved Jack Charteris!  There was no questioning that; it was written in her face, was vibrant in her voice as she spoke of him.