He heard her voice at his ear, remorseful and most appealing.  “Oh, Wub, what have I done that you should treat me so?”

Sir Charles Hardiman, watchful of the duel, guessed from the movement of her lips what she was saying.

“These nicknames are the very devil,” he exclaimed, apparently about nothing, to his startled neighbour.  “The first thing a woman does when she’s fond of a man is to give him some ridiculous name, which doesn’t belong to him.  She worries her wits trying this one and that one, as a tailor tries on you a suit of clothes, and when she has got your fit, she uses it—­publicly.  So others use it too and so it no longer contents her.  Then she invents a variation, a nickname within a nickname, and that she keeps to herself, for her own private use.  That’s the nickname I am referring to, my dear, when I say it’s the very devil.”

The lady to whom he spoke smiled vaguely and surmised that he might be very right.  For herself, she said, she had invented no nicknames; which was to assert that she had never been in love.  For the practice seems invariable, and probably Dido in times long since gone by had one for AEneas, and Virgil knew all about it.  But since she was a woman, it would be a name at once so absurd and so intimate that it would never have gone with the dignified rhythm of the hexameter.  “Wobbles” had been the first name which Stella Croyle had invented for Harry Luttrell, though by what devious process she had lighted upon it, psychology could not have discovered.  “Wub” was the nickname within the nickname, the cherished sign that the two of them lived apart in a little close-hedged garden of their own.  Luttrell’s eyes were upon her as she spoke it.  And she spoke it with a curious little wistful pursing of soft lips so that it came to him winged with the memory of all her kisses.

“Oh, Wub, must you leave me?” she pleaded in a breaking whisper.  “What will be left to me if you do?”

Luttrell dropped his forehead in his hands.  All the character which he had in those untried days bade him harden himself against the appeal.  But his resolution was melting like metal in a furnace.  He tried to realise the truth which Hardiman had uttered three or four hours before.  There would be sooner or later a quarrel, a humiliating, hateful quarrel over some miserable trifle which neither Stella nor he would ever afterwards forgive.  But her voice was breaking with a sob in a whisper at his ear and how could he look forward so far?

“Stella!”

He turned impulsively towards her.

“The game’s up,” reflected Sir Charles Hardiman at the end of the table.  “Calypso wins—­no, by God!”