“Of course you’ll dine with us to-night:  I told Ella you would come.”

He had said, “Thanks; I shall be very pleased.”

“Come early; eight sharp,” Mr. Linton had added.

And thus it was that at five minutes to eight o’clock Herbert found himself face to face alone with the woman whom he had so grossly humiliated.

Perhaps she was hard on him after all:  she addressed him as Mr. Courtland.  She felt that she, at any rate, had returned to the straight path of duty when she had done that. (It was Herbert Courtland who had talked to Phyllis of the modern philosopher—­a political philosopher or a philosophical politician—­who, writing against compromise, became the leading exponent of that science, and had hoped to solve the question of a Deity by using a small g in spelling God.  On the same principle Ella had called Herbert “Mr. Courtland.”)

He felt uneasy.  Was he ashamed of himself, she wondered?

“Stephen will be down in a moment, Mr. Courtland,” she said.

He was glad to hear it.

“How warm it has been all day!” she added.  “I thought of you toiling away over figures in the city, when you might have been breathing the lovely air of the sea.  It was too bad of Stephen to bring you back.”

“I assure you I was glad to get his letter at Leith,” said he.  “I was thinking for the two days previous how I could best concoct a telegram to myself at Leith in order that I might have some excuse for running away.”

“That is assuming that running away needs some excuse,” said she.

There was a considerable pause before he said, in a low tone: 

“Ella, Ella, I know everything—­that night.  We were saved.”

At this moment Mr. Linton entered the room.  He was, after all, not late, he said:  it wanted a minute still of being eight o’clock.  He had just been at the telephone to receive a reply regarding a box at Covent Garden.  In the earlier part of the day none had been vacant, he had been told; but the people at the box office promised to telephone to him if any became vacant in the course of the afternoon.  He had just come from the telephone, and had secured a good enough box on the first tier.  He hoped that Ella would not mind “Carmen”; there was to be a new Carmen.

Ella assured him that she could not fail to be interested in any Carmen, new or old.  It was so good of him to take all that trouble for her, knowing how devoted she was to opera.  She hoped that Herbert—­she called him Herbert in the presence of her husband—­was in a Carmen mood.

“I’m always in a mood to study anything that’s unreservedly savage,” said he.

“There’s not much reservation about our little friend Carmen,” said Mr. Linton.  “She tells you her philosophy in her first moment before you.”

He hummed the habanera.

“There you are:  Misteroso e l’amore—­that’s the philosophy of your pretty savage, Herbert.”