"You liar! You damnable liar!"
The dinner was not the supplice Mrs. Armine had anticipated. She talked, she laughed, she was gay, frivolous, gentle, careless, as in the days long past when she had charmed men by mental as much as by merely physical qualities. And Nigel responded with an almost boyish eagerness. Her liveliness, her merriment, seemed not only to delight but to reassure something within him. She noticed that. And, noticing it, she was conscious that with his decision, beneath it as it were, there was something else, some far different quality, stranger to her, though faintly perceived, or perhaps, rather, obscurely divined by that sleepless intuition which lives in certain women. Her apparent joyousness gave helping hands to something in Nigel, leading it forward, onward—whither?
She was to know that night.
At length the dinner was over, and they got up to go into the drawing-room. And now, instantly, Mrs. Armine was seized by a frantic longing to escape. The felucca, she felt sure, was waiting on the still water just below the promontory. If only Nigel would remain behind over his cigarette in the dining-room for a moment, she would steal out to see. She would not start, of course, till he was safely upstairs. But she longed to be sure that the boat was there.
"Won't you have your cigarette in here?" she said, carelessly, as he followed her towards the door.
"Here? Alone?"
His voice sounded surprised.
"I thought perhaps you wanted another glass of wine," she murmured with a feigned indifference as she walked on.
"No," he said, "I am coming to the terrace with you."
"For a little while. But you must soon go to bed. Now that Doctor Isaacson has gone, I must play the sick nurse again, or you will be ill, and then I know he'll blame me."