“Do you know the name of the newspaper?” he asked eagerly.

“I was told,” Nora answered, “but under the most solemn abjuration of secrecy.  You ought to be able to guess it, though.  Then a woman whom I met in the Lyceum Chub this afternoon asked me outright if there was any truth in certain rumours about Tallente, so people must be talking about it.”

The cloud lingered on Dartrey’s face.  He ate and drank in his usual sparing fashion, silently and apparently wrapped in thought.  From the other side of the pink-shaded lamp which stood in the middle of the table, Nora watched him with a curious, almost a sardonic sadness in her clear eyes.  An hour ago she had looked at herself in the mirror and had been startled at what she saw.  The lines of her black gown, the most extravagant purchase of her life, had revealed the beauty of her soft and shapely figure.  Her throat and bosom had seemed so dazzlingly white, her hair so rich and glossy, her eyes full of the hope, the softness, almost the anticipatory joy of the woman who has everything to offer to the one man in her life.  She had felt as she had looked:  almost a girl, with music on her lips and joyous things in her heart, nursing that wonderful gift to her sex,—­the hopeless optimism begotten of love.  And her little house of cards had tumbled so quickly to the ground, the little denouement on which she had counted had fallen so flat.  They two were there alone.  The little dinner which she had planned was as near perfection as possible.  The champagne bubbled in their glasses.  The soft light, the solitude, the stillness,—­nothing had failed her, except the man.  Stephen sat within a few feet of her, with furrowed brow and mind absorbed by a possible political problem.

Nora made coffee at the table, but they drank it seated in great easy chairs drawn up to the fire.  She passed him silently a box of his favourite brand of cigarettes.  Perhaps that evidence of her forethought, the mute resignation of her restrained conversation with its attempted note of cheerfulness forced its way through the chinks of his unnatural armour.  His whole face suddenly softened.  He leaned across and took her fingers into his.

“Dear Nora,” he sighed, “what a brute I must seem to you and how difficult it is for me to try and tell you all that is in my heart!”

“All tasks that are worth attempting are difficult,” she murmured.  “Please go on.”

“They are such simple things that I feel,” he began, “simple and yet contradictory.  I should miss you more out of my life than any other person.  I shall resent from my very soul the man who takes you from me.  And yet I know what life is, dear.  I know how inexorable are its decrees.  You have a fancy for me, born of kindness and sympathy, because you know that I am a little lonely.  In our thoughts, too, we live so much in the same world.  That is just one of the ironies of life, Nora.  Our thoughts can move linked together through all the flowery and beautiful places of the world, but our bodies—­alas, dear!  Do you know how old I really am?”