"I'm sorry to disturb you, Jack," she was saying. "I suppose you were fast asleep, and you'll wish you hadn't told me you were going to stop at the Tarascon. But I can't help it! Do you mind getting up and dressing in a hurry, and letting me come round to see you?"
"Shan't I call at your house instead?" Jack suggested, wide awake now.
"No, I must come to you. Have you a private sitting room?"
"I haven't."
"Then take one at once, and be ready to receive me in it. Will half an hour be too soon for you?"
"Not a bit," Jack assured her. He spoke with the warmth of affection, and felt it. But that was all he felt. The reaction he'd been expecting yesterday hadn't come yet!
He 'phoned downstairs that he wanted a private sitting room, and breakfast for two, with flowers on the table, in half an hour. Then he plunged into his bath, and as he shaved and dressed with the haste that knows how not to waste a single step or gesture (this was characteristic of him) he wondered, as he had wondered yesterday, about himself and Juliet.
Funny, how he had dreaded meeting her married, for fear the boiling lava should break through the cooled crust! And the lava hadn't broken through. He couldn't even feel it boil. Juliet had her old sweetness, and charm—even more. She was prettier than ever, too.
He still loved her, of course, only the love didn't hurt like a wound with someone twisting a knife in it, as it had hurt when she told him she was engaged, and on the day of her wedding. There was just a gentle, rather interesting pain, like the pain of remembering a beautiful dream which had broken off in the midst; and it was no sharper this morning than when she came to tea with him yesterday.
Just to test himself he had gone to the opera, and stood up (because there wasn't a seat to be had) in order to have Juliet burst upon him in all her glory, wearing the pearls, and, perhaps, beaming with recovered happiness at Claremanagh's side. Well, she had come late into her box, and made a sensation. Everyone had stared at her—and the pearls—through levelled glasses. She had been just as glorious as he'd expected, though she hadn't exactly beamed. And he—Jack—had not turned a hair! He hardly knew whether to attribute this to his superhuman self-control, or the strong moral barrier set up between his thoughts and his love by her marriage.