'Yes, and with such a fiend incarnate as Iago to poison his mind he could not have been Othello without being driven into madness.'
Laurette was glancing over the paper, but there was something restless and nervous in her manner.
'Then what would you consider a sufficient reason for an estrangement in a modern play?'
'Oh, I cannot say! I imagine if people really love each other, nothing that another could say or do would estrange them, unless there is an Iago in the case, and such a man is much rarer than——'
'Than a grand passion?' put in Tareling. 'Ah, Miss Stella, it seems to me you have a very charming colour this morning.'
She turned on him, and parried the insinuation, with a laughing, radiant face.
'I don't think I can quite forgive you for not showing me the woman who wept so copiously when the despairing lovers could not even move a muscle. How the sight would have consoled me!'
Letters were brought in; several for Stella. Among them she discerned one addressed in a handwriting the sight of which made her heart throb stormily.
Laurette was trembling with excitement. She had opened a letter, but instead of reading it she looked over it furtively at Stella, whose face at that moment was irradiated as if a rosy flame shone through it—her lips slightly parted in a happy smile, her eyes lustrous as stars. The Honourable Talbot Tareling's home correspondence was chiefly of the kind that takes the disgustingly prosaic form of requesting payment—applications which, as a rule, rouse neither enthusiasm nor curiosity in the recipient's breast. Tareling turned over his with an air of profound indifference; then he glanced from his wife's face to Stella's with an expression of curious inquiry. Laurette caught the look, and coloured violently, instantly taking refuge in her open letter.
'It is evident that I shall have to spend part of the morning at my desk,' said Stella, rising and gathering up her letters.