This night must see its end.  For her powers were exhausted.  She meant to tell Baroudi so.  He must take her away now, or let her join him somewhere.  But in any case she must get away from her life with Nigel.  She could no longer play the devoted wife, safe at last, after many trials, in the arms of respectability.  It was only by making a cruel effort that she was able to get through the day without rousing suspicion in Nigel.  And to-day he was curiously observant of her.  His eyes seemed to be always upon her, watching her with a look she could not quite understand.  He never left her for a moment, and sometimes she had a strange sensation that, like herself, he was on the verge of—­what—­some self-revelation?  Some confession?  Some perhaps emotional laying bare of his heart?  She did not know.  But she did know that he was not in a normal state.  And once or twice she wondered what had been the exact truth of the quarrel with Isaacson.  But, at any rate, it had not been the truth in which she was concerned.  And she was too frightfully intent upon herself to-day to be very curious, even about Isaacson’s relations with her husband.

He was gone, and gone without having tried to destroy her.  That was enough.  She would not bother about small things to-day.

At last the evening approached along the marvellous ways of gold.  As she saw the sky beginning to change Mrs. Armine’s fever of excitement and impatience increased.  Now that the moment of her meeting with Baroudi was so near she felt as if she could not bear even another second’s delay.  How she was going to escape from her husband she did not know.  But she did not worry about that.  She could always manage Nigel somehow, and she would not fail for the first time to-night.

When the moment came it would find her ready.  Of that she was sure.

She made up her face elaborately that evening, put a delicate flush upon her cheeks, darkened her eyebrows more than usual, made her lips very red.  She took infinite pains to give to her face an appearance of youth.  Her eyes burned out of the painted shadows about them.  Her shining hair was perfectly arranged in the way that suited her best.  She put on a very low-cut evening gown, that showed as much as possible of her still lovely figure.  And she strove to think that she looked no older now than when Baroudi had seen her last.  The mirror contradicted her cruelly.  But she was determined not to believe what it said.

At last she was ready, and she went down to get through the last supplice, as she called it to herself, the tete-a-tete dinner with Nigel.

He was not yet down, and she was just going to step out upon the terrace when he came into the drawing-room in evening dress.  This was the first evening since his illness that he had dressed for dinner, and the clothes he wore seemed to her a sign that soon he would resume his normal and active life.  The look of illness which she had thought she saw in his face that morning had given place to an expression of intensity that must surely be the token of inward excitement.