“I’m forty-five,” said Conyers.

“Well, well!” Hugh frowned impatiently.  “It’s a detail, as I said before.  Who cares for a year more or less?”

“Which means,” observed Conyers, with his dry smile, “that the one woman is older than you are.”

“She is,” Palliser admitted recklessly.  “She is five years older.  But what of it?  Who cares?  We were made for each other.  What earthly difference does it make?”

“It’s no one’s business but your own,” remarked Conyers through a haze of smoke.

“Of course it isn’t.  It never has been.”  Hugh yet sounded in some fashion indignant.  “There never was any other possibility for me after I met her.  I waited for her six mortal years.  I’d have waited all my life.  But she gave in at last.  I think she realized that it was sheer waste of time to go on.”

“What was she waiting for?” The question came with a certain weariness of intonation, as though the speaker were somewhat bored; but Hugh Palliser was too engrossed to notice.

He stretched his arms wide with a swift and passionate gesture.

“She was waiting for a scamp,” he declared.

“It is maddening to think of—­the sweetest woman on earth, Conyers, wasting her spring and her summer over a myth, an illusion.  It was an affair of fifteen years ago.  The fellow came to grief and disappointed her.  She told me all about it on the day she promised to marry me.  I believe her heart was nearly broken at the time, but she has got over it—­thank Heaven!—­at last.  Poor Damaris!  My Damaris!”

He ceased to speak, and a dull roar of thunder came out of the night like the voice of a giant in anguish.

Hugh began to smoke, still busy with his thoughts.

“Yes,” he said presently, “I believe she would actually have waited all her life for the fellow if he had asked it of her.  Luckily he didn’t go so far as that.  He was utterly unworthy of her.  I think she sees it now.  His father was imprisoned for forgery, and no doubt he was in the know, though it couldn’t be brought home to him.  He was ruined, of course, and he disappeared, just dropped out, when the crash came.  He had been on the verge of proposing to her immediately before.  And she would have had him too.  She cared.”

He sent a cloud of smoke upwards with savage vigour.

“It’s damnable to think of her suffering for a worthless brute like that!” he exclaimed.  “She had such faith in him too.  Year after year she was expecting him to go back to her, and she kept me at arm’s length, till at last she came to see that both our lives were being sacrificed to a miserable dream.  Well, it’s my innings now, anyway.  And we are going to be superbly happy to make up for it.”

Again he flung out his arms with a wide gesture, and again out of the night there came a long roll of thunder that was like the menace of a tortured thing.  A flicker of lightning gleamed through the open door for a moment, and Conyers’ dark face was made visible.  He had ceased to smoke, and was staring with fixed, inscrutable eyes into the darkness.  He did not flinch from the lightning; it was as if he did not see it.