“I hope so, Owen, but somehow I don’t see myself as Lady Asher.”

“You know everyone—­Lady Ascott, Lady.  Somersdean, they are all your friends, it will be just the same.”

“Yes, it’ll be just the same.”

He did not catch the significance of the repetition.  He was thinking of the credit she would do him as Lady Asher.  He heard his friends discussing his marriage at the clubs.  She was going to Lady Ascott’s ball, and would announce her engagement there.  To-morrow everyone would be talking about it.  He would like his engagement known, but not while she was on the stage.  But when he mentioned this, she said she did not see why their engagement should be kept a secret.  It did not matter much; he was quite ready to give way, but he could not understand why the remark should have angered her.  And her obstinacy frightened him not a little.  If he were to find a different woman in his wife from the woman he had loved in the opera singer!

“Evelyn, you have lived with me in spite of your scruples for the last six years; why should we not go on for one more year?  When you have sung Kundry, we can be married.”

“Owen, do you think you want to marry me?  Is not your offer mere chivalry? Noblesse oblige?”

That he was still master of the situation caused a delicious pride to mount to his head.  For a moment he could not answer, then he asked if she were sure that she had not come to care for someone else, and feeling this to be ineffective, he added—­

“I’ve always noticed that when women change their affections, they become a prey to scruples of conscience.”

“If I cared for anyone else, should I come to you to-night and offer to marry you?”

“You’re a strange woman; it would not surprise me if the reason why you wish to be married is because you’re afraid of a second lover.  That would be very like you.”

His words startled her in the very bottom of her soul; she had not thought of such a thing, but now he mentioned it, she was not sure that he had not guessed rightly.

How well he understood one side of her nature; how he failed to understand the other!  It was this want in him that made marriage between them impossible.  She smiled mysteriously, for she was thinking how far and how near he had always been.

“Tell me, Evelyn, tell me truly, is it on account of religious scruples, or is it because you are afraid of falling in love with Ulick Dean, that you came here to-night and asked me to marry you?”

“Owen, we can live in contradiction to our theories, but not in contradiction to our feelings, and you know that my life has always seemed to me fundamentally wrong.”

For a moment he seemed to understand, but his egotism intervened, and a moment after he understood nothing, except that for some stupid morality she was about to break her artistic career sharp off.