He stared at me with the immense, the devastating, dignity of the utterly careless. I bitterly wanted to wake him up, to make him see the thing he had done, the beastly thing. For Venice! “It’s no good,” I said cruelly, “keeping Venice waiting for ever....”
He scowled at me, or at something just behind my shoulder. “I’m going to see Iris,” he said.
It was quite definite, he was going to see Iris. It would probably, I supposed, do Iris all the good in the world to see Napier on this critical night. Napier and Iris. It might make her care whether she lived or died ... but why shouldn’t she die? Venice would condemn her to die. Iris was the foe. Why shouldn’t she die? You can’t do things like that, and not die. Stealing like a little thief into the garden of Venice, and stealing away like a little thief ... to bear Napier’s child, unknown to Napier....
“Hell!” he muttered. I stared at him, at those burning, broken eyes.
“Hell!” he said. “Oh, God, what hell! What? If you only knew....”
“I don’t want to know,” I snapped. Well, did one want to know? But he didn’t hear, didn’t care, didn’t see. Being with him, you can see, was exactly like eavesdropping. Why, if Venice came in and saw this love-lost man ... her Napier, her darling, like this, with burning broken eyes. But there are some things that can’t happen! You couldn’t take Napier from Venice. And how quickly, how poignantly, Venice, if she saw him like this, would know the difference between his easy, smiling love for her and this ... damnable madness.
But in the dark taxi she wouldn’t see his face, and I was just about to try again to get him away when he said fiercely: “It’s not as though I don’t know anything about it. Or do you think Iris is a liar? What?”
“Napier, you really must pull yourself together—”
“No, but any one would think I was a most fearful cad. What?”
And he scowled, in that Napier way of his that made one want to forgive him everything. “I mean, not coming before, seeing she’s so ill ... waiting all this time, and coming just now. Why, she wrote to me four weeks ago, saying she was going to be just slightly ill and have a rest for a week or two, so of course—Oh, look here, here’s the letter, you’ll see for yourself—”