‘It has grown cold,’ she said, and tinkled a hand-bell which was on the tray to summon Mahmoud.
Othmar, who had sprung to his feet and stood erect, seized her wrist in his fingers and threw the bell aside.
‘There is no need to dismiss me,’ he said in a low tone. ‘Adieu! You can tell the story to Lord Geraldine.’
His face was quite colourless, except that around his forehead there was a dusky red mark where the blood had surged and settled as though he had been struck there with a whip.
He bowed low, and left her.
She stood before the Moorish tray and its contents with a sense of cold at her heart, but her little self-satisfied smile was still on her mouth.
‘He will come back,’ she thought. ‘He came back before; they always come back.’
She did not intend to go with him to Asia, but she did not, either, intend to lose him altogether.
‘He was superb in his fury and his grief,’ she thought, ‘and he meant every word of it, and he would do all that he said, more than he said. Perhaps it hurt him too much, perhaps I laughed a little too soon.’
She was like the child who had found its living bird the best of all playthings, but had forgotten that its plaything, being alive, could also die, and so had nipped the new toy too cruelly in careless little fingers, and had killed it.