“All the time.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Well, I have known you most of your life, and I never heard you speak of her before—not in that way at all. I did not know that you had been her lover.”
“I was not. But once, before she left England, I was—I was her lover’s under-study. I have lived on it ever since,” he added, after a pause.
Then, through some queer freak of the brain, the humour of the mistaken kiss appealed to him again, and he began to laugh—uncontrollably, as if the thing had just happened.
Laughter was the worst thing possible for him in that state. He died laughing.
“I suppose she—Viola—didn’t care,” said Erato thoughtfully, when Terpsichore had finished her story.
“You forget that she had some one else to think about. Did you ever know a woman yet that thought twice, by way of pity, about a man she did not love, when she had a man that she did love to think about?”
“N—no,” Erato replied.