I did promise; and so, after a few more last words, we parted, more coldly than we had ever done in all the years through which we had been intimate.

Guy left England the same evening, and descended like a thunder-clap on the joyous little menage in the Rue de la Madeleine, where Forrester and his bride were still fluttering their wings in the honeymoon-shine of post-nuptial spring.

They were miraculously happy, those two.  Indeed, they seemed to have only one taste between them, and that was Charley’s.  If he felt inclined, which was not seldom, to utter inaction, his wife encouraged him in his laziness, sitting contentedly for hours on her footstool, with her silky hair just within reach of his indolent hand.  If, after dinner, he suggested the “Italiens,” or the “Bouffes,” it was always precisely that theatre that she had been thinking of all the morning.  She was in the seventh heaven when he won a hurdle-race in the Champ de Mars.

They made excursions into the banlieue, and farther afield yet, like a couple of the Pays Latin in their first loves.  The cabinets of Bercy and St. Cloud knew them; so did the arbors of Asnieres, where, in oilskin and vareuse, muster for their Sabbat the ancient mariners of the Seine.  Nay, it has been whispered that more than once—­close veiled and clinging tightly to her husband’s arm—­Isabel witnessed at Mabille and the Chaumiere the choregraphic triumphs of Frisette, Pomare, and Mogador.

My hand trembles while I record such enormities and backslidings.  O Brougham-girls of Belgravia, who “never gave your mothers a moment’s uneasiness”—­stars of the Western hemisphere, who can be trusted any where without fear of your wandering from your orbits—­think on this lost Pleiad, once your companion, and be warned.  Men are deceivers ever, even when they mean matrimony; and the tender mercies of the Light Dragoon are cruel.

Isabel was dreadfully startled at the sudden appearance of her cousin.  Her notions of his power were quite unlimited and irrational, and I believe her first thought was that he had changed his mind about the propriety of her marriage, and was come to carry her back into the house of her bondage with the strong hand.

When his curt sentences told her the facts, sorry as she was, it certainly was rather a relief to her.  Charley was full of compassion too, but he only confided this to his wife.  He knew better than to try condolence with Guy, and felt instantly that the case was far beyond his simple powers of healing.

They did not see much of him.  The contrast of their happiness with his own state must have grated on his feelings.  His grim presence chilled and clouded their little banquets at the Trois Freres or the Cafe de Paris.  He sat there among the bright lamps and flowers like a statue of dark marble that it is impossible to light up, drinking all the while, moodily, of the strongest wines to that portentous extent that it made Isabel nervous and her husband grave.