“Will you take a little more of the rose-leaf jelly?” he asked.

“No, no.”

She dropped the box.  It made a dry sound as it struck the table.

“I must stay at Armant some days.  I have to look after my sugar interests there.”

“Oh—­sugar!” she exclaimed.  “My husband may think you do nothing but look after your affairs, but you mustn’t suppose a woman—­”

“A woman—­what?”

“I knew from the first you loved pleasure.”

She took up the fan again.

“From the first?  When was that?”

“On the Hohenzollern, of course.”

“And I—­I knew—­I knew—­”

He paused, smiling at her.

“What did you know?”

“Oh, I can understand something of women—­when they permit me.  And on the Hohenzollern you permitted me.  Did you not?”

“I never spoke to you alone.”

“It was not necessary.  It was not at all necessary.”

“Of course, I know that.”

She was burning—­her whole body was burning—­with retrospective jealousy, and as she looked at him the flame seemed to be fanned, to give out more heat, to scorch her, sear her, more terribly.  A man like this, an Eastern, utterly untrammelled, with no public opinion—­and at this moment England, in her thought of it, seemed full of public opinion; Puritan England—­to condemn him or restrain him, in this climate what must his life have been?  And what would his life be?  Something in her shrieked out against his freedom.  She felt within her a pain that was almost intolerable; the pain of a no longer young, but forcible, woman, who was still brimful of life, and who was fiercely and physically jealous of a young man over whom she had no rights at all.  Ah, if only she were twenty years younger!  But—­even now!  She leaned her arms carelessly on the table, and managed to glance into the lid of the boite de beaute which he had given her.  The expression in the eyes that looked into hers from the lid startled her.  Where was her experience?  She was ashamed of herself.  Crudity was all very well with this man, but—­there were limits.  She must not pass them without meaning to do so, without knowing she was doing so.  And she had not lived her life since her divorce without discovering that the greatest faux pas a jealous woman can take is to show her jealousy.  Husbands of other women had proved that to her up to the hilt, when she had been their refuge.

“Of course!  You know much of men.”

He spoke with a quiet assurance as of one in complete possession of her past.  For the first time the question, “Has he heard of the famous Mrs. Chepstow?  Does he—­know?” flashed through her mind.  It was possible.  For he had been in Europe, to Paris.  And he could read English, and perhaps had read many English papers.

“Did you ever hear of some one called ’Bella Donna’?” she said, slowly.