‘How did you find me out?’ she asked.
‘I saw you at the theatre, and followed you home.’
‘Eh bien!’ she exclaimed, with a very doubtful French pronunciation. ‘What do you want with me?’
‘Want with you?’ he repeated. ‘My God! Nothing!’
She laughed again, flashing her teeth and eyes. Then springing up, she approached a small table, and took up a large box of cigarettes. Her white hand trembled violently.
‘Can I offer you a cigarette?’ she said, glancing at him over her naked shoulder.
‘No, no!’
‘With your permission I will light one myself!’ she said, striking a wax match and suiting the action to the word. Then holding the cigarette daintily between her white teeth, she again sat down facing him. ‘Well, I am glad you have not come to make a scene. It is too late for that. We agreed to part long ago, and it was all for the best.’
‘You left me,’ he answered in a hollow voice.
‘Just so,’ she replied, watching the thin cloud of smoke as it wreathed from her lips. ‘I left you because I saw we could never get along together. It was a stupid thing of us to marry, but it would have been a still stupider thing to remain tied together like two galley-slaves. I was not the little innocent fool you supposed me, and you were not the swell I at first imagined; so we were both taken in. I went to India with young St. Clare, and after he left me I was very ill, and a report, which I did not contradict, got into the papers that I had died. I went on the stage out there under an assumed name, and some years ago returned to England.’