She did not see him enter, and he had time to note what matrimony, and the three years and the three million pounds, had done to her.  She was radiant and exquisite, a little paler, a little more complete, but increasingly graceful and perfectly appointed.  Her dress was of dark green, of a most delicate shade, and with the clinging softness and texture of velvet.  She wore a jacket of the same material, and a single brilliant ornament at her throat relieved the simplicity.  In the hat, too, one big solitary emerald shone against the lighter green.

She was talking now with animation and amusement to the shop-girl who was supplying her with sweets, and every attendant was watching her with interest and pleasure.  Stafford reflected that this was always her way:  wherever she went she attracted attention, drew interest, magnetized the onlooker.  Nothing had changed in her. nothing of charm and beauty and eloquence,—­how eloquent she had always been!—­of esprit, had gone from her; nothing.  Presently she turned her face full toward him, still not seeing him, half hidden as he was behind some piled-up tables in the centre of the shop.

Nothing changed?  Yes, instantly he was aware of a change, in the eyes, at the mouth.  An elusive, vague, distant kind of disturbance—­he could not say trouble—­had stolen into her eyes, had taken possession of the corners of the mouth; and he was conscious of something exotic, self-indulgent, and “emancipated.”  She had always been self-indulgent and selfish, and, in a wilful, innocent way, emancipated, in the old days; but here was a different, a fuller, a more daring expression of these qualities....  Ah, he had it now!  That elusive something was a lurking recklessness, which, perhaps, was not bold enough yet to leap into full exercise, or even to recognize itself.

So this was she to whom he had given the best of which he had been capable—­not a very noble or priceless best, he was willing to acknowledge, but a kind of guarantee of the future, the nucleus of fuller things.  As he looked at her now his heart did not beat faster, his pulses did not quicken, his eye did not soften, he did not even wish himself away.  Love was as dead as last year’s leaves—­so dead that no spirit of resentment, or humiliation, or pain of heart was in his breast at this sight of her again.  On the contrary, he was conscious of a perfect mastery of himself, of being easily superior to the situation.

Love was dead; youth was dead; the desire that beats in the veins of the young was dead; his disillusion and disappointment and contempt for one woman had not driven him, as it so often does, to other women—­to that wild waste which leaves behind it a barren and ill-natured soil exhausted of its power, of its generous and native health.  There was a strange apathy in his senses, an emotional stillness, as it were, the atrophy of all the passionate elements of his nature.  But because of this he was the better