'"Voilà qu'il regarde déjà la petite Flore,"' she repeated; 'and she is so stupid that she knows no better than to be angry!'
Béthune glanced at her wistfully. After a moment's silence he said in a low tone:
'There are those who never look—elsewhere.'
She smiled, knowing his meaning, and touched by the remembrance of his long constancy.
'Ah, my dear friend,' she said, with some pang of conscience, 'I have had too much affection given me in my life, and perhaps I have given too little.'
As she walked back through the gardens, under the long arcades covered with tea roses and the banksian creepers, she thought with that ridicule of herself, as of others, which was always sure to succeed any emotion:
'Nous voilà en plein mélodrame!—the contrast of the husband's infidelity makes the lover's fidelity touch the hard heart of the deserted wife! We are all grouped ready for the stage of the Gymnase!'
She seemed absurd to herself in her anger and her humiliation. She had always been so contemptuous of life when it grew melodramatic, although so impatient of it while it remained dull.
Othmar watched her cross the gardens from where he stood in one of the windows of his library. Under the excuse of many letters to dictate to his secretaries, he had escaped for awhile from his guests.