"I thought you'd like to see me in something smarter for dinner," she said. "Do you like it, Bernard?"
"It could not be better," said John. Inwardly he was saying: "I like everything about you; I like your fine, dark hair; I like your frank, beautiful eyes, and your honesty and your simplicity, and the fact that you are a girl and yet a woman. What I do dislike, however, is the fact that you have a waster of a husband, and that I have no right to be here this minute standing in that waster's shoes."
They sat down together at the round table in the middle of the hotel' parlour. The waiter, a gloomy individual, in tired-looking dress clothes and in a white shirt that should have been washed a week earlier, lit four pink-shaded candles, served the soup, and went away. Soup was followed by fish and an excellent entrée. John, looking over the top of the pink-shaded candles, saw a brightness in Elaine's eyes. He had been talking gaily keeping the conversation away from anything personal, and telling her anecdotes that made her laugh. And all the time, although he was not aware of the fact, he was drawing her towards him, fanning the flame of love that the real Bernard Treves had never kindled. She was experiencing new feelings towards this man whom she believed to be her husband. The shifty look in his eyes that she had disliked in the past had vanished. The Bernard Treves who sat before her looked frankly and keenly into her face. He was not in the least intimate; he was, indeed, somewhat aloof, but this very quality of aloofness puzzled and attracted her.
By the time dinner was cleared away and the cloth removed, Elaine was completely at her ease. Her old fear of offending her husband had totally vanished. She could not understand her own feelings and began to take herself to task for having been hard with him in the past. When Bernard Treves had persisted in his habit of heavy drinking and drug-taking, she had been obliged to make a stand. She had done everything she could to win him to better ways. But when to these habits he had added violence and other cruelties towards herself, she had informed him that until he made some effort to control himself she could not live with him as his wife. It was characteristic of her, as it is sometimes characteristic of gentle people, that firmness lay beneath an unaggressive exterior. She had kept her word. But to-night, for the first time, she began to doubt the justice of what she had done. She told herself that she had been hard on Bernard Treves, that she ought to have clung to him, however low he sank.
CHAPTER XVII
John, who had deposited himself on a chair at the hearth, lit a cigarette, and was consuming it with a good deal of satisfaction. He had never in his life partaken of an evening meal that had given him so much satisfaction; even the funereal and shabby waiter seemed to him a creature of delight, and the little room in the hotel—he would always remember it as an apartment brightened by the eyes of Elaine Treves. It was not usual for John Manton to be led away, but to-night, for some minutes, he let his senses toy with impossibilities. He permitted himself to forget the existence of Bernard Treves. And when the waiter left the room, and Elaine rose and came towards him, he made no effort to avoid her approach, as he had done once or twice earlier in the evening. She stood beside his chair and laid her hand on his shoulder. John looked up and saw that her face had grown serious.
"I want to make a confession to you, Bernard."
"Let it be a cheerful confession," smiled John.
"I was mistaken, after all."
"It's easy to make mistakes," returned John.