“To-night—­I don’t know,” she said.

Her ears were full of the music that wailed and throbbed in the breast of the night.

“Can’t you forgive that one going back on myself after all these days and—­and nights together?  Haven’t I proved anything to you in them?”

“You have seemed to, perhaps.  But men so often seem, and aren’t.  And I did think you knew why I had married you.”

“Tell me why you married me.”

“Not to-night.”

“Long ago,” he said, and now he spoke slowly, and with a deep earnestness which suddenly caught the whole of her attention, “Long ago I loved a girl, Ruby.  She was very young, knew very little of the world, and nothing at all of its beastlinesses.  I think I loved her partly because she knew so little, she was so very pure.  One could see—­see in her eyes that they had never looked, even from a distance, on mud, on anything black.  She loved me.  She died.  And, after that, she became my ideal.”

He looked at her, slowly lifting his head a little.  There was a light in his eyes which for a moment half frightened, half fascinated her, so nakedly genuine was it—­genuine as a flame which burns straight in an absolutely windless place.

“In my thoughts I always kept her apart from all other women—­always—­for years and years, until one night in London, after I knew you.  That night—­I don’t know how it was, or why—­I seemed to see her and you standing together, looking at each other; I seemed to know that in you both—­I don’t know how to tell it exactly”—­he stopped, looked down, like one thinking deeply, like one absorbed in thought—­“that in you both, mixed with quantities of different things, there was one thing—­a beautiful thing—­that was the same.  She—­she seemed that night to tell me that you had something I had loved in her, that it was covered up out of sight, that you were afraid to show it, that nobody believed you had it within you.  She seemed to tell me that I might teach you to trust me and show it to me.  That night I think I began to love you.  I didn’t know I should ever tell this to any one, even to you.  Do you think I could tell it if I distrusted you as much as you seem to think?”

“Give me a glass of Apollinaris, will you, Nigel?” she said.  “It’s over there beside the bed.”

“Apollinaris!”

He stared at her as if confused by this sudden diversion.

“Over there!”

She pointed.  The long sleeve, like a wing, fell away from her soft, white arm.

“Oh—­all right.”

He went to get it.  She sat still, looking out through the open window to the moonlight that lay on the white stone of the balcony floor.  She heard the chink of glass, the thin gurgle of liquid falling.  Then he came back and stood beside her.

“Here it is, Ruby.”

The enthusiasm had gone out of his voice, and the curious light had gone out of his eyes.