It came at length with a crash of instruments and voices, and a few minutes afterwards my husband and I were in the cab on our way back to the hotel.

I was choking with mingled anger and shame—­anger at my husband for permitting me to come to a place in which I could be exposed to a public affront from his cast-off mistress, shame at the memory of the pitiful scheme for entering into his life which had fallen to such a welter of wreck and ruin.

But my husband himself was only choking with laughter.

“It was as good as a play,” he said.  “Upon my soul it was!  I never saw anything funnier in the whole course of my life.”

That served him, repeated again and again, until we reached the hotel, when he ordered a bottle of wine to be sent upstairs, and then shook with suppressed laughter as we went up in the lift.

Coming to our floor I turned towards my bedroom, wishing to be alone with my outraged feelings, but my husband drew me into one of our sitting-rooms, telling me he had something to say.

He put me to sit in an arm-chair, threw off his overcoat, lit a cigarette, as well as he could for the spurts and gusts of his laughter, and then, standing back to the fire-place, with one hand in his pocket and his coat-tail over his arm, he told me the cause of his merriment.

“I don’t mind telling you that was Lena,” he said.  “The good-looking girl in the scarlet dress and the big diamonds.  She spotted me the moment she stepped on to the stage.  Must have guessed who you were, too.  Did you see how she looked at you?  Thought I had brought you there to walk over her.  I’m sure she did!”

There was another gust of laughter and then—­

“She’d been going about saying I had married an old frump for the sake of her fortune, and when she saw that you could wipe her off the face of the earth without a gown that was worth wearing, she was ready to die with fury.”

There was another gust of laughter through the smoke that was spurting from his mouth and then—­

“And you, too, my dear!  Laughing and applauding!  She thought you were trying to crow over her!  On her own particular barn-door, too!  Upon my soul, it was too amusing.  I wonder she didn’t throw something at you.  She’s like that when she’s in her tantrums.”

The waiter came in with the wine and my husband poured out a glass for me.

“Have a drink.  No?  Well, here’s to your health, my dear.  I can’t get over it.  I really can’t.  Lena’s too funny for anything.  Why, what else do you think she’s been saying?  She’s been saying I’ll come back to her yet.  Yes, ‘I’ll give him six months to come crawling back to me,’ she said to Eastcliff and Vivian and some of the other fellows at the Club.  Wonder if she thinks so now? . . .  I wonder?”

He threw away his cigarette, drank another glass of the wine, came close up to me and said in a lower tone, which made my skin creep as with cold.