She did not break the silence for some time, but at last she said:  “And what were you a thousand years ago, my man?”

He drew a hot hand across a troubled brow.  “I?  I was the Satrap whose fury you soothed away, or I was the Antony you lured from fighting Caesar.”

It was as though he had read those lines written by Ian Stafford long ago.

Again that perfume of hers caught his senses, and his look softened wonderfully.  A certain unconscious but underlying discontent appeared to vanish from his eyes, and he said, abruptly:  “I have it—­I have it.  This dress is like the one you wore the first night that we met.  It’s the same kind of stuff, it’s just the same colour and the same style.  Why, I see it all as plain as can be—­there at the opera.  And you wore blue the day I tried to propose to you and couldn’t, and asked you down to Wales instead.  Lord, how I funked it!” He laughed, happily almost.  “Yes, you wore blue the first time we met—­like this.”

“It was the same skirt, and a different bodice, of course both those first times,” she answered.  Then she stepped back and daintily smoothed out the gown she was wearing, smiling at him as she did that day three years ago.  She had put on this particular gown, remembering that Ian Stafford had said charming things about that other blue gown just before he bade her good-bye three years ago.  That was why she wore blue this night—­to recall to Ian what it appeared he had forgotten.  And presently she would dine alone with Ian in her husband’s house—­and with her husband’s blessing.  Pique and pride were in her heart, and she meant Ian Stafford to remember.  No man was adamantine; at least she had never met one—­not one, neither bishop nor octogenarian.

“Come, Ruddy, you must dress, or you’ll be late,” she continued, lightly, touching his cheek with her fingers; “and you’ll come down and apologize, and put me right with Ian Stafford, won’t you?”

“Certainly.  I won’t be five minutes.  I’ll—­”

There was a tap at the door and a footman, entering, announced that Mr. Stafford was in the drawing-room.

“Show him into my sitting-room,” she said.  “The drawing-room, indeed,” she added to her husband—­“it is so big, and I am so small.  I feel sometimes as though I wanted to live in a tiny, tiny house.”

Her words brought a strange light to his eyes.  Suddenly he caught her arm.

“Jasmine,” he said, hurriedly, “let us have a good talk over things—­over everything.  I want to see if we can’t get more out of life than we do.  There’s something wrong.  What is it?  I don’t know; but perhaps we could find out if we put our heads together—­eh?” There was a strange, troubled longing in his look.

She nodded and smiled.  “Certainly—­to-night when you get back,” she said.  “We’ll open the machine and find what’s wrong with it.”  She laughed, and so did he.

As she went down the staircase she mused to herself and there was a shadow in her eyes and over her face.