"Am I?" he says bitterly. "I should have thought the reverse; I feel changed enough, Heaven knows."
She is silent. Her heart is beating fast, the colour comes and goes in her face. She is thinking how glad she is she did not put on that terra-cotta gown with its huge puffs and frills, but discarded it at the last moment for this soft creamy robe of Indian silk, that seems to float about her like a mist, and show all the lovely curves of her perfect figure as she moves or stands. Cyril Carlisle thinks her more lovely than ever. The old pain so long buried and fought against comes back all too vividly. He knows he has never forgotten, never ceased to love this woman; but she—how calm, how changed she is! Again, as in the past, comes back the thought of all his love for her had meant, of all they might have been but for his own folly, his own sin.
"A man's passions are ever their own Nemesis," he thinks wearily, and then her voice falls on his ear again. She is introducing him to some one. A limp and lack-lustre "damosel," as she loves to be called, attired in pale sage-green that makes him bilious to contemplate; and he is fain to give this maiden his arm, and conduct her through the rooms, and listen to her monotonous tattle of art jargon, which seems to him the most idiotic compound of nonsense and ignorance ever filtered through the lips of a woman—and he has heard a good deal.
His thoughts will go back to this strange meeting.
She is not married, she is free still. Was it faithfulness to him, or—— He thrusts the thought aside contemptuously. What folly it seems! What woman could remember for thirteen years? Besides, had they not parted in anger? Had she not cast him aside with contempt and fierce scorn, and bitter words that had stabbed him to the heart?
He roams about the beautiful rooms. He hears her name on every tongue. He knows that men of science and learning are here—men of note in the highest circles of art and literature. He is glad that her tastes are so pure and elevated, glad that he does not find her a mere woman of fashion, a frivolous nonentity. Again and again he finds himself watching that fair, serene face, that exquisite figure, which is a living embodiment of grace that may well drive all women desperate with envy.
How calm she is! How passionless, how changed! Men speak of her beauty, the beauty that lends itself so perfectly to this fantastic fashion of which all her guests seem devotees, and the words turn his blood to fire. Yet, after all, why should he mind? She is nothing to him—nothing. He is beside her again. She does not appear to notice his presence, but she is well enough aware of it. It lends warmth and colour and animation to her face, it lights her great grey eyes, and brings smiles to her lips. His heart grows bitter within him. She must have long ago grown callous and forgotten. Does she really forget how passionately she loved him once! Does she think of him no more than if he were the veriest stranger in her crowded rooms? Has she ever wept, prayed, suffered for him?
God help us, men and women both, if we could not in some way mask our faces and conceal our feelings! Because the world sees no tears in our eyes it does not follow they are never shed; because there are smiles on our lips it is not a necessity that our hearts are without suffering. When the curtain is down, when the theatre is empty and dark, then, perhaps, the real play begins; the play that no audience sees, that is only acted out to our own breaking, beating hearts, unsuspected and unknown to the world around!