BARONESS. [Sits down at the table with her back to the public; the HUSBAND takes a chair beside her] He looked like you, and—barring certain weaknesses—his character also....
HUSBAND. He was about ten years older than I.... And he had a scar on his right cheek that looked as if it had been made by a needle....
BARONESS. That's right!
HUSBAND. Then I met your husband one night in London.
BARONESS. Is he alive?
HUSBAND. I have to figure it out—for the moment I can't tell.... Let's see! That was five years ago—in London, as I told you. I had been to a party—men and women—and the atmosphere had been rather depressed. On leaving the place, I joined the first man who gave me a chance to unburden myself. We were en rapport at once, and our chat developed into one of those endless sidewalk conversations, during which he let me have his entire history—having first found out that I came from his own district.
BARONESS. Then he is alive?...
HUSBAND. He was not killed in the war—that much is certain—because he was taken prisoner. Then he fell in love with the mayor's daughter, ran away with her to England, was deserted by his fair lady, and began to gamble—with constant bad luck. When we separated in the morning hours, he gave me the impression of being doomed. He made me promise that if chance should ever put you in my way after a year had gone by, and provided that he had not in the meantime communicated with me by advertisement in a newspaper I am always reading, I was to consider him dead. And when I met you, I was to kiss you on the hand, and your daughter on the brow, saying on his behalf: "Forgive!"
As he kisses the hand of the BARONESS, ROSE appears on the veranda, outside the open door, and watches them with evident excitement.
BARONESS. [Agitated] Then he is dead?