"You are a fool! Oh!" she cried stormily, twisting her fingers. "Oh, fool!"
My lord pressed his handkerchief to his beautiful mouth. He was silent, gazing with dark eyes on Marius, ignoring his wife.
The younger man forced himself into speech again.
"There is no one to blame, sir, is there?" He now smiled, and it maddened the Countess. She could have understood anything but that. Her husband had never been remotely within her reach, and now Marius stepped beyond it. That they should smile!
"I had an intuition of what had happened when I entered the room," said my lord. "Tragedy on the heels of the ludicrous! Certainly it is no one's fault, Marius."
The Countess rose with the fierce intent of dragging their emotions on to a level that she could understand, but for the second time Marius hushed her with a glance and a movement of his hand.
"I met my lady when she was Miss Hilton," he said firmly, looking at his brother, "and between us was some folly that might have been everything and was nothing—too small a matter to have been mentioned, my lord, had not—we—I—been surprised by this meeting."
The Earl's gaze was grave, but curiously tender too. He leant rather heavily against the mantelshelf, and there was a very faint smile on his lips.
"Do not suppose that I do not understand," he said, and his beautiful voice was soft.
It seemed to the Countess that they both ignored her, that they spoke a language she could not comprehend; that she stood an alien before them.