She sat in silence for a moment, and I, curiously eager for her next remark and conscious suddenly of that strange, muffled excitement that had oppressed me a few hours before, watched her closely, gathering handfuls of sand and spilling them over my knee.
"Did you ever go to Broadway?" she began again.
"I have, yes."
"I did, too," she assured me eagerly. "I think it is beautiful. I should like to live there, should not you? Perhaps," hopefully, "you do live there?"
"No," I said, still on my guard and uncomfortable, "I don't. Are you planning to live there after you are married?" She shook her head regretfully.
"I am afraid not," she said, and her voice dropped a full third and coloured with a most absurd and exquisite sombre quality, as Duse's used to in La Dame aux Camellias. "Roger would not want to. He will not want me to walk there very much, either. And that is very strange, because there is where I first saw him. But there are places I shall like quite as well, he says, and he will take me there. Will you come, too?"
"I am afraid," I replied drily, "that I might be a little de trop, perhaps. Roger might not care for my society under those circumstances."
Again she answered my tone rather than my words.
"Roger loves you," she said simply.
"He used to," I returned—inexcusably. Oh, yes! utterly inexcusably.