“A year divides us—love from love,
Though you love now, though I loved then,
The gulf is straight, but deep enough,
Who shall recross—who among men
Shall cross again?”
“You came in very late last night, darling,” Zai says, a little reproachfully, as she sits en peignoir—but a peignoir daintily got up, with Valenciennes and pink ribbons, and looks divinely fair at the head of the breakfast-table.
“There was a carriage accident on the Boulevard, and I helped the occupants to get out,” he answers.
It is the first falsehood he has uttered to his wife, and in spite of him a tinge of red sweeps across his fair skin, to hide which he buries his face in his coffee-cup.
“Were the occupants ladies?” Zai asks, with a sensation of incipient jealousy.
She has learned to think this husband of hers so superbly handsome and irresistible that she believes all other women must consider him so likewise.
“Yes, ladies—old ladies, going home from some concert. They were terribly frightened, poor old girls,” he says, coolly.
“And how did you amuse yourself, darling?—and did you talk to anyone?”
“Why, you’ve grown into the Grand Inquisitor, my pet! I went to the theatre and I talked to Shropshire and Silverlake.”
“Those men!” she says with a little moue. “They are dreadfully fast, are they not, Delaval?”