"But I do not want to be alone here without you," she pleaded. She could not for her life have told why she was so distressed at the idea, but it gave her pain, and she insisted.
"As you wish," said Marcantonio, kissing her hand. "I will make every arrangement for your comfort, and do what I can to make the journey pleasant."
He was a little surprised, but, manlike, he was flattered at his wife's show of affection. There are moments in a woman's life when, whether she loves her husband or not, she turns to him and holds to him with an instinctive sense of reliance.
A moment later Julius Batiscombe was announced, and the three went in to dinner. It was a strange position, though it is by no means an uncommon one. A man, his wife, and another man, an outsider; the outsider loving the woman, the husband supremely happy and unconscious, and the woman feeling the evil influence, not altogether opposing it, and yet clinging desperately to her husband's love. Three lives, all trembling in the balance of weal and woe. But no one could have suspected it from their appearance, for they were apparently the gayest and most thoughtless of mortals.
The adventure in the afternoon, the expedition to Castellamare, the baskets and even the cook,—then, the events of the past winter, their many mutual acquaintances, and the whole unfathomable cyclopædia of society facts and fictions,—everything was reviewed in turn, and talked of with witty comments, good-natured or ill-natured as the case might be. Batiscombe was full of strange stories, generally about people they all knew, but he was not a gossip by nature, and he avoided saying disagreeable things. Leonora, on the other hand, would be gay and brilliant for a few moments, and then would let fall some bitter saying that sounded oddly to Batiscombe, though it made her husband laugh.
"You would have us believe you terribly disillusioned, Marchesa," said Batiscombe, after one of these sallies. Leonora laughed, and her eyes flashed again as she looked at him across the table.
"You, who are so fond of Eastern magic," she said, "should give back to this age all the illusions we have lost."
"Were I to do so," answered Batiscombe, looking into her eyes as he spoke, "I fear that you, who are so fond of Western philosophy, would tear them all to pieces."
"My poor philosophy," exclaimed Leonora, "you will not let it alone. You seem to think it is to blame for everything,—as if one could not try, ever so humbly, to learn a little something for one's self, without being always held up for it as an exception to the whole human race. It is as if I were to attribute everything you say and do to the fact of your having written a book—how many—two? three?" She laughed gayly. "I do not know," she continued, "and I will never read anything more that you write, because you laugh at my philosophy."
"It is better to laugh at it than to cry at it," said Marcantonio, without meaning anything.