‘Wonderful, is it not,’ he said, ’that we should be talking like this to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?’

‘Wonderful!’ I responded.  ’But yesterday we talked with our eyes, and our eyes did not say Mr. or Miss.  Our eyes said—­Ah, what they said can never be translated into words!’

My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun.  Could it be true that Heaven had made that fine creature—­noble and modest, nervous and full of courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things, fine and delicate—­could it be true that Heaven had made him and then given him to me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves constituted perfection?  Oh, wonder, wonder!  Oh, miraculous bounty which I had not deserved!  This thing had happened to me, of all women!  How it showed, by comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my worldly splendour!  I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water and the palm.  And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade.  Wonderful!

‘Why were you so late to-night?’ I asked abruptly.

‘Late?’ he replied absently.  ‘Is it late?’

We both looked at the clock.  It was yet half an hour from midnight.

‘Of course it isn’t—­not very,’ I said.  I was forgetting that.  Everybody left so early.’

‘Why was that?’

I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by reason of his failure to appear.  He glanced at me with tender amaze.

‘But I am fortunate to-day,’ I exclaimed.  ’Was it not lucky they left when they did?  Suppose you had arrived, in that state, dearest man, and burst into a room full of people?  What would they have thought?  Where should I have looked?’

‘Angel!’ he cried.  ’I’m so sorry.  I forgot it was your evening.  I must have forgotten.  I forgot everything, except that I was bound to see you at once, instantly, with all speed.’

Poor boy!  He was like a bird fluttering in my hand.  Millions of women must have so pictured to themselves the men who loved them, and whom they loved.

‘But still, you were rather late, you know,’ I smiled.

‘Do not ask me why,’ he begged, with an expression of deep pain on his face.  ’I have had a scene with Mary.  It would humiliate me to tell you—­to tell even you—­what passed between us.  But it is over.  Our relations in the future can never, in any case, be more than formal.’