Somehow, now that she saw the fact stated in print, Mrs. Armine felt suddenly more conscious both of the triumph of Lady Harwich and of the Harwich, which was the social, faction generally, and of what seemed her own defeat.  What a comfortable smile there must be just now upon the lips of the smart world, upon the lips of numbers of women not a bit better than she was!  And Nigel had “let her in” for it all.  Her lips tightened ominously as she remembered the cool American eyes of Lady Harwich, which had often glanced at her with the knowing contempt of the lively but innocent woman, which stirs the devil in women who are not innocent, and who are known not to be innocent.

She put down the paper; she went to the window and looked out.  From the garden there rose to her nostrils the delicate scent of some hidden flower that gave its best gift to the darkness.  In the distance, to her right, there was a pattern of coloured fire relieved against the dimness, that was not blackness, of the world.  That was Baroudi’s dahabeeyah.

Women were smiling in London, were rejoicing in her misfortune.  As she looked at the lines of lamps, they seemed to her lines of satirical eyes, then, presently, lines of eyes that were watching her and were reading the truth of her nature.

She called Marie, and again she changed her gown.

While she was doing so, Nigel came up once more, taking Baroudi to a bedroom, and presently tried the door between her bedroom and his.

“Can’t come in!” she called out, lightly.

“You’re not changing your dress?”

“I couldn’t dine in linen.”

“But we are both—­”

“Men—­and I’m a woman, and I can’t dine in linen.  I should feel like a sheet or a pillow-case.  Run away, Nigel!”

She heard him washing his hands, and presently she heard him go away.  She knew very well that the lightness in her voice had whipped him, and that he was “feeling badly.”

When the small gong sounded for dinner, she went downstairs, dressed in a pale yellow gown with a high bodice in which a bunch of purple flowers was fastened.  She wore no jewels and no ornament in her hair.

As she came into the room, for a moment Nigel had the impression that she was a stranger coming in.  Why was that?  His mind repeated the question, and he gazed at her with intensity, seeking the reason of his impression.  She was looking strangely, abnormally fair.  Had she again, despite the conversation of the morning, “done something” to her face?  Was its whiteness whiter than usual?  Or were her lips a little redder?  Or—­he did not know what she had done, whether, indeed, she had done anything—­but he felt troubled, ill at ease.  He felt a longing to be alone with Ruby, to make her forgive him for having hurt her in the morning.  He hated the barrier between them, and he felt that he had created it by his disbelief in her.  Women are always more sensitive than men, and who is more sensitive than the emerging Magdalen, encompassed by disbelief, by irony, by wonder?  He felt that in the morning he had been radically false to himself, that by his lapse from a high ideal of conduct he had struck a heavy blow upon a trembling virtue which had been gathering its courage to venture forth into the light.