"Weeping?" said Julia, and her heart fluttered to her throat, so that she could hardly speak, and Kitty's maxims kept dancing before her eyes as if written in letters of fire. "Make him jealous—oh, if you make him jealous you will win the rubber yet!"
"If I wept," said she, "must my tears have been for you?"
"How now?" said Sir Jasper, and dropped the little hand that struggled so gently yet determinedly to be free.
"Oh, dear me," said Lady Standish, "how droll you men are!" She shrugged her shoulders and laughed affectedly. Like all budding actresses she over-did the part. But Sir Jasper was too much stirred, too much bewildered to be critical. Moreover his armour was not without vulnerable joints, and with a wanton word she had found one at the first pass.
"How now?" said he. "Madam, and what might that mean?"
Lady Standish trilled the bar of a song, and again directed her attention to the view.
"Julia," said her husband in a deep voice. "Julia," he repeated with a threatening growl of passion.
"Sir?" she said, and tilted her little head.
"Who then were your tears for, if they were not for me? What signify these manners? What do these insinuations mean? By Jupiter, I will have the truth!" His face flushed, the veins on his temples swelled, his nostrils became dilated.
Lady Standish lifted the hanging lace of her sleeve with one hand and examined it minutely.