“It never would!” cry I, passionately.  “If you had been the last man in the world—­if we had been left together on a desert island—­I never should have liked you, never!  I never would have seen more of you than I could help!  There is no one whose society I grow so soon tired of.  I have said so over and over again to the boys.”

“Have you?”

“What good reason can you give me for preferring you to him?” I ask, my voice trembling and quivering with a passionate indignation; “I am here, ready to listen to you if you can!  How are you such a desirable substitute for him?  Are you nobler? cleverer? handsomer? unselfisher?—­ if you are” (laughing bitterly), “you keep it mighty well hid.”

No reply:  not a syllable.

“It is a lie” I cry, with growing vehemence, “a vile, base, groundless lie, to say that I am not glad he is coming back!  Barbara knows—­they all know how I have been wearying for him all these months.  I was not in love, as you call it, when I married him—­often I have told him that—­and perhaps at Dresden I missed the boys a little—­he knows that too—­he understands! but now—­now—­” (clasping my hands upon my heart, and looking passionately upward with streaming eyes), “I want no one—­no one but him!  I wish for nothing better than to have him—­ him only!—­and to-day, until I met you—­till you made me loathe myself and you, and every living thing—­it seemed to me as if all the world had suddenly grown bright and happy and good at the news of his coming.”

Still he is silent.

“Even if I had not liked him” pursue I, finding words come quickly enough now, and speaking with indignant volubility, as, having risen, I again face him—­“even if I had wanted to flirt with some one, why on earth should I have chosen you?” (eying him with scornful slowness, from his wide-awake to his shooting-boots), “you, who never even amused me in the least!  Often when I have been talking to you, I have yawned till the tears came into my eyes!  I have been afraid that you would notice it.  If I had known” (speaking with great bitterness), “I should have taken less pains with my manners.”

He does not answer a word.  What answer can he make?  He still stands under the wintry tree, white to lividness; drops of cold sweat stand on his brows; and his fine nostrils dilate and contract, dilate and contract, in an agony of anger and shame.

“What could have put such an idea into your head?” cry I, clasping my hands, while the tears rain down my cheeks, as—­my thoughts again flying to Barbara—­I fall from contempt and scorn to the sharpest reproach.  “Who would have thought of such a thing? when there are so many better and prettier people who, for all I know, might have liked you.  What wicked perversity made you fix upon me who, even if I had not belonged to any one else, could never, never have fancied you!”