Dominey sat as a man enthralled with silence. She watched him.
“Not on your knees yet?” she asked, with faint but somewhat resentful irony. “Can it be, Leopold, that you have lost your love for me? You have changed so much and in so many ways. Has the love gone?”
Even to himself his voice sounded harsh and unnatural, his words instinct with the graceless cruelty of a clown.
“This is not practical,” he declared. “Think! I am as I have been addressed here, and as I must remain yet for months to come—Everard Dominey, an Englishman and the owner of this house—the husband of Lady Dominey.”
“Where is your reputed wife?” Stephanie demanded, frowning.
“In the nursing home where she has been for the last few months,” he replied. “She has already practically recovered. She cannot remain there much longer.”
“You must insist upon it that she does.”
“I ask you to consider the suspicions which would be excited by such a course,” Dominey pleaded earnestly, “and further, can you explain to me in what way I, having already, according to belief of everybody, another wife living, can take advantage of this mandate?”
She looked at him wonderingly.
“You make difficulties? You sit there like the cold Englishman whose place you are taking, you whose tears have fallen before now upon my hand, whose lips—”