He understood her then, and stammered: “You?”
“Forgive me! And let me tell you!... It will help you to understand Owen.... There were little things ... little signs ... once I had begun to watch for them: your reluctance to speak about her ... her reserve with you ... a sort of constraint we’d never seen in her before...”
She laughed up at him, and with her hands in his he contrived to say: “Now you understand why?”
“Oh, I understand; of course I understand; and I want you to laugh at me—with me! Because there were other things too ... crazier things still.... There was even—last night on the terrace—her pink cloak...”
“Her pink cloak?” Now he honestly wondered, and as she saw it she blushed.
“You’ve forgotten about the cloak? The pink cloak that Owen saw you with at the play in Paris? Yes ... yes.... I was mad enough for that!... It does me good to laugh about it now! But you ought to know that I’m going to be a jealous woman ... a ridiculously jealous woman ... you ought to be warned of it in time...”
He had dropped her hands, and she leaned close and lifted her arms to his neck with one of her rare gestures of surrender.
“I don’t know why it is; but it makes me happier now to have been so foolish!”
Her lips were parted in a noiseless laugh and the tremor of her lashes made their shadow move on her cheek. He looked at her through a mist of pain and saw all her offered beauty held up like a cup to his lips; but as he stooped to it a darkness seemed to fall between them, her arms slipped from his shoulders and she drew away from him abruptly.
“But she was with you, then?” she exclaimed; and then, as he stared at her: “Oh, don’t say no! Only go and look at your eyes!”