It was Howard’s turn to struggle for self-control. “I understand,” he said, “why you wished me not to go on. You never said those words to me before—and——”
“Oh, yes I have—many and many a time.”
“With your eyes, but not with your voice—at least not so that I could hear. And—well, it is not easy to look calm and only friendly when every nerve in one’s body is vibrating like a violin string under the bow. Yes, let us talk of something else. I’ve never been acutely conscious of the presence of others when I’ve been with you. To-night I’m in great danger of forgetting them altogether.”
“That would be so like you.” Marian laughed, then raised her voice a little and went on. “Yes, your little restaurant in the Rue Louis le Grand was gone. There was a dressmaker in its place—Raudinitz. She made this. How do you like it?”
“It has the air of—of belonging to you.”
Marian looked amused. Howard shrugged his shoulders. “All roads lead to Rome,” he said.
Carnarvon hung about until the women went to bed, so Howard and Marian had no opportunity to be alone. As soon as he saw his last chance vanish, he went to his own room, to the solitude of its balcony in the shadow of the projecting facade with the moonlight flooding the rocks and the sea.
As he sat smoking, the recession came, the reaction from weeks of nervous tension. And with the ebb of the tide entered that Visitor who alone has the privilege of the innermost chamber where lives the man himself, unmasked of all vanity and show and pretense. The visit was not unexpected; for at every such crisis every one is certain of a call from this Visitor, this merciless critic, plain and rude of speech, rare and reluctant in praise, so mocking in our moments of elation, so cruelly frank about our follies and self-excuses when he comes in our moments of depression.
“So you are going to marry?” the Visitor said abruptly. “I thought you had made up your mind on that subject long ago.”