That night, when Lord Carlyon returned about one o'clock, he found the house dark and silent. No one was waiting up for him but his valet, a discreet and sober individual who knew his master's secrets and kept them; not at all because he respected his master, but because he respected his master's wife. And the semi-obscurity and grave solitude of his home irritated 'Beauty' Carlyon to a most inconsistent degree, inasmuch as he had himself telegraphed to Delicia that she was not to sit up for him.
'Where is her ladyship?' he demanded haughtily. 'Did she go out this evening?'
Gravely the valet assisted him to pull off his opera coat as he replied,—
'No, sir—my lord, I mean—her ladyship dined alone, and retired early. I believe the maid said her ladyship was in bed by ten.'
Carlyon grumbled something inaudible and went upstairs. Outside his wife's room he paused and tried the handle of her bedroom door; it was locked. Surprised and angry, he rapped smartly on the panels; there was no answer save a low, fierce growl from Spartan, who, suddenly rising from his usual post on the landing outside his mistress's sleeping chamber, manifested unusual and extraordinary signs of temper.
'Down, you fool!' muttered Carlyon, addressing the huge beast. 'Lie down, or it will be the worse for you!'
But Spartan remained erect, with ears flattened and white teeth a-snarl, and Carlyon, after rapping once more vainly at the closed door, gave it up as a bad job and retired to his own private room.
'Never knew her so dead asleep before,' he grumbled. 'She generally stays awake till I come home.'
He flung himself into his bed with a kind of sullen rage upon him; things had gone altogether very wrong with him that evening. He had lost money (Delicia's money) at play, and La Marina had been in what her intimates called 'one of her nasty humours.' That is, she had drunk a great deal more champagne than was good for her, and had afterwards exhibited a tendency to throw wine glasses at her admirers. She had boxed Carlyon's ears, put a spoonful of strawberry ice down his back, and called him 'a ha'porth of bad aristocrat.'
'What do you suppose we artistes marry such fellows as you for?' she had yelled, with a burst of tipsy laughter. 'Why, to make you look greater fools than ever!'