Had his tone been less angry and stern, her reply might not have been so bitterly cutting.
"Your questions, Harold, I must say, are pointed ones," she answered, as, seating herself, she broke into a seemingly disingenuous smile, and shook her head protestingly; "and it seems to me that they are utterly uncalled for, too. Our life for the past two years should have demonstrated that fact. However, to answer your questions: Your intuitions were correct; I did choose that song purposely for you, and only began to sing it when I heard you coming. As to the question of my sentiments toward you: When you remember that it is scarcely twenty minutes since you, once more, bitterly found fault with me, and that, too, almost before the servants, because I chose to go out again to-night, and angrily informed me that you would like to see me here before I left the house—surely you did not expect to find me trilling a love-song for you in heart-broken accents! Still, I must say that I wish you had not made it necessary for me to be so tryingly frank."
Her reply stung him deeply. With tightening lips he turned away, and muttered under his breath, "I am, indeed, right! She has not the slightest love left for me; it will delight her to be free."
"Grace," he said, a little sadly—but, unfortunately, also again sternly—as he halted by her side, "You and I, like so many others, evidently were not intended for each other."
Her clasped hands tightened, but he did not notice it; he was sure that he thoroughly understood her now.
"It is a pity," he went on, grimly, with his eyes fixed on the carpet, "that human nature is not gifted with the faculty of reading the future; so many mistakes and so much suffering would be prevented." He was thinking more of the unhappy days she must have spent with him, during the past two years, than of his own disappointment in her. But she did not understand the words in this way, and thinking he wanted her to know what a terrible mistake he had made when he married her, five years ago, her high-strung, nervous temperament was aroused still more, and rising quickly, she said, almost recklessly:
"I never knew before, Harold, that you were such a humanitarian and had such lofty longings to save others suffering; indeed, were you not evidently so much in earnest, I should certainly think that you were indulging in jests." Somehow her low laugh, this time, hardly rang true.
The cynical reply caused her husband's figure to straighten out stiffly—they both were now at dangerous cross purposes.
Meeting his gaze, she went on crisply: "And was it for the sake of expatiating on the general failure of marriage that you commanded me to meet you here before I could go out?" Without waiting for a reply, she drew out her gold watch, and after glancing at it, said carelessly, "I am afraid I shall not be able to listen to all the pros and cons of this vast question to-night, as I have, as you are aware, to be at the opera in a half-hour or so."
His face now lit up angrily, as he rejoined hotly, "Yes, it was to discuss this vast question that I wanted to see you alone; but not to discuss it in the abstract, as you evidently think, but as it concerns you and me, and to try to remedy, as far as possible, the mistake you evidently must have made when you thought you loved and married me."