“I only wanted to see if you’d cut me, Wallie.  Topsy bet me two to ten you wouldn’t.”

“Why on earth should I?”

“Oh, on earth I know you wouldn’t.  But didn’t I hear just now you’d married and gone to heaven?”

“Gone to——?”

“Sh—­sh—­sh—­I’m sure she doesn’t let you use those naughty words.  You needn’t say you’re not in heaven, for I can see you are.  You didn’t expect to meet me there, did you?”

“I certainly didn’t expect to meet you here.”

“How can you be so rude?  Dick, take that tiresome plate from him, he doesn’t know what to do with it.  Yes.  I’ll have another before it goes away for ever.”

Majendie had given up the plate before he realised that he was parting with the link that bound him to the outer world.  He turned instantly to follow it there; but she saw his intention and frustrated it.

“Butter?  Ugh!  You might hold my cup for me while I take my gloves off.”

She peeled two skin-tight gloves from her plump hands, so carefully that the operation gave her all the time she wanted.

“I believe you’re still afraid of me?” said she.

He was doing his best to look over her head; but she smiled a smile so flashing that it drew his eyes to her involuntarily; he felt it as positively illuminating their end of the room.

“You’re not?  Well, prove it.”

“Is it possible to prove anything to you?”

Again he was about to break from her impatiently.  Nothing, he had told himself, would induce him to stay and talk to her.  But he saw Anne’s face across the room; it was pale and hard, fixed in an expression of implacable repulsion.  And she was not looking at Lady Cayley, but at him.

“You can prove it,” said Lady Cayley, “to me and everybody else—­they’re all looking at you—­by sitting down quietly for one moment, and trying to look a little less as if we compromised each other.”

He stayed, to prove his innocence before Anne; and he stood, to prove his independence before Lady Cayley.  He had longed to get away from the woman, to stand by his wife’s side—­to take her out of the room, out of the house, into the open air.  And now the perversity that was in him kept him where he hated to be.

“That’s right.  Thank heaven one of us has got some presence of mind.”

“Presence of mind?”

“Yes.  You don’t seem to think of me,” she added softly.

“Why should I?” he replied with a brutality that surprised himself.

She looked at him with blue eyes softly suffused, and the curve of a red mouth sweet and tremulous.  “Why?” her whisper echoed him.  “Because I’m a woman.”

Her eyelids dropped ever so little, but their dark lashes (following the upward trend of her features) curled to such a degree that the veil was ineffectual.  He saw a large slit of the wonderful, indomitable blue.

“I’m a woman, and you’re a man, you see; and the world’s on your side, my friend, not on mine.”