“Not by a long shot,” agreed the conductor, as he went out, softly closing the door behind him.

Whereupon the cosmopolitan air dropped from Mr. Howard Spence, not gracefully, and he became once more that superfluous and awkward and utterly banal individual, the husband.

“Let’s go out and walk on the platform until the train starts,” suggested Honora, desperately.  “Oh, Howard, the shades are up!  I’m sure I saw some one looking in!”

He laughed.  But there was a light in his eyes that frightened her, and she deemed his laughter out of place.  Was he, after all, an utterly different man than what she had thought him?  Still laughing, he held to her wrist with one hand, and with the other pulled down the shades.

“This is good enough for me,” he said.  “At last—­at last,” he whispered, “all the red tape is over, and I’ve got you to myself!  Do you love me just a little, Honora?”

“Of course I do,” she faltered, still struggling, her face burning as from a fire.

“Then what’s the matter?” he demanded.

“I don’t know—­I want air.  Howard, please let me go.  It’s-it’s so hot inhere.  You must let me go.”

Her release, she felt afterwards, was due less to a physical than a mental effort.  She seemed suddenly to have cowed him, and his resistance became enfeebled.  She broke from him, and opened the door, and reached the cement platform and the cold air.  When he joined her, there was something jokingly apologetic about his manner, and he was smoking a cigarette; and she could not help thinking that she would have respected him more if he had held her.

“Women beat me,” he said.  “They’re the most erratic stock in the market.”

It is worthy of remark how soon the human, and especially the feminine brain adjusts itself to new conditions.  In a day or two life became real again, or rather romantic.

For the American husband in his proper place is an auxiliary who makes all things possible.  His ability to “get things done,” before it ceases to be a novelty, is a quality to be admired.  Honora admired.  An intimacy—­if the word be not too strong—­sprang up between them.  They wandered through the quaint streets of New Orleans, that most foreign of American cities, searching out the tumbledown French houses; and Honora was never tired of imagining the romances and tragedies which must have taken place in them.  The new scenes excited her,—­the quaint cafes with their delicious, peppery Creole cooking,—­and she would sit talking for a quarter of an hour at a time with Alphonse, who outdid himself to please the palate of a lady with such allure.  He called her “Madame”; but well he knew, this student of human kind, that the title had not been of long duration.