up.  She did not know what to do.  Poor child, how should she have known?  On the previous evening I had told her she was to marry me.  She was ready to obey.  She went to bed thinking that she was to marry me.  In the morning she went for her music lesson.  Pasquale was waiting for her.  They walked for some distance down the road.  He hailed a cab and drove away with her.

“He said he loved me,” said Carlotta, “and he kissed me, and he told me I must go away with him to Paris and marry him.  And I felt all weak, like that—­” she dropped her arms helplessly in an expressive gesture, “and so what could I do?”

“Didn’t you think, Carlotta, that I might be sorry—­perhaps unhappy?” I asked as gently as I could.

“He said you would be quite happy with the other woman.”

“Did you believe him?”

“That’s why I said I have been very wicked,” Carlotta answered, simply.

She went on with her story—­an old, miserable, detestable, execrable story.  At first all went merrily.  Then she fell ill in Paris.  It was her first acquaintance with the northern winter.  Her throat proved to be delicate and she was laid up with bronchitis.  To men of Pasquale’s type, a woman ill is of no more use than a spavined horse or a broken-down motor-car.  More than that, she becomes an infernal nuisance.  It was in his temperament to perform sporadic acts of fantastic chivalry.  It appealed to something romantic, theatrical, in his facile nature.  But to devote himself to a woman in sickness—­that was different.  The fifteenth century Italian hated like the devil continued association with pain.  He would have thrown his boots to a beggar, but he would have danced in his palace over the dungeons where his brother rotted in obscurity.

So poor Carlotta was neglected, and began to eat the bread of disillusion.  When she got well, there was a faint recrudescence of affection.  Has not this story been written a million miserable times?  Why should I rend my heart again by retelling it?  Wild rages, jealousies, quarrels, tears—­

“And then one day he said, ’You damned little fool, I am sick to death of you,’ and he went away, and I never saw him again.  He wrote and he sent his valet to put me in the pension.”

“And yet, Carlotta,” said I bitterly, “you would go back to him if he sent for you?”

She sprang forward and gripped me by the arm—­I was sitting quite close to her—­and her face wore the terror-stricken expression of a child frightened with bogies.

“Go back?  After what he has done to me?  You would not send me back?  Seer Marcous, darling, you will keep me with you?  I will be good, good, good.  But go back to Pasquale?  Oh, no-o-o!”

She fell back in her sofa-corner, and fixed her great, deep imploring eyes on me.

“My dear,” said I, “you know this is your home as long as ever you choose to stay in it—­but—­” and I stroked her hair gently—­” if he comes back when your child is born—­his child—­”