“Yes, dear.”  His voice was eager.  “I had to see you.  To stay in exile any longer was unendurable.  I was thinking of you always, wanting you always, and so I came.  You forgive me, don’t you?”

Marcia laughed.  “It’s very nice to be wanted,” she answered, “but sit over there across the hearth and light your cigar.  It’s gone out.”

Paul looked down resentfully at the cigar and lifted his hand to toss it away, but the girl laid her fingers on his wrist and laughed.

“No,” she commanded.  “Smoke it.  Tobacco is soothing and I like the fragrance.  It’s a Romney panatella, isn’t it?”

“How do you manage to remember details like that?” Paul inquired with boyish pleasure.  “Other women don’t carry in mind the brand of tobacco that a man prefers.”

“I’m not other women,” she reminded him lightly.  “I have a genius for minute and trivial things.  The others flatter you by burning incense to your music—­and I remember that you take two lumps of sugar in your coffee and one slice of lemon in your tea and that you must have your Martini extra dry.”

To herself she was saying, with a lump in her throat which waged war on the bright smile in her eyes, “I hoped that he might have come differently.  I hoped that he might have made an end of vacillation.  Now it’s all going to be harder.  I must send him away again—­”

One hand which fell over the arm of her chair and which he could not see clutched its fingers convulsively, squeezing the handkerchief it held into a small wad of linen.

“You are wonderful, Marcia,” he told her softly as he comfortably exhaled a cloud of blue smoke, and his delicate lips fell into a smile of contentment.  His troubles were for the moment being assuaged in the effortless indolence of the lotus-eaters.  He looked at her through half-closed lids, studying the face that smiled at him.  Yes, she was giving him her strength.  He would go back tomorrow appeased and soothed.

Then he suggested with the suddenness of a newly discovered thought:  “But we’ve been talking about my troubles all the while.  Tell me something about yourself.  It must be proving a hard trip, isn’t it?  A bit of a trial at times?”

A hard trip!  A bit of a trial at times!  For an instant the smile died and the lips stiffened.  She wanted to answer him with a stormy burst of words.  She wanted to say that it had been sheer hell.

In the face of such callous complacency an indignant anger stirred deep in her breast.  He had fled to her with his troubles, which after all were only the shadows of deeper troubles, of which other members of his household were bearing, unaided, the more direct brunt.  He was asking her, whose life had known chapters of tragedy, to give him such sympathy as a woman has the right to give in exchange for a man’s whole love.  Had he no sense of fairness, even the fairness of good sportsmanship?  But close on the heels of that realization came another which