“No,” he replied. “I have an appointment.”
“But you can surely dine here?”
“I am not quite certain,” he answered. “If I can, I will send you a telegram.”
“You are impatient—you who promised me to wait until I could give you some satisfactory explanation. It is cruel of you—very cruel, Nino,” she said in a voice scarcely above a whisper.
“You are never straightforward,” he replied quickly. “If you confessed to me, all this anxiety would at once cease.”
“I cannot.”
“No,” he said meaningly; “you will not. You dare not, because your past has not been what it should have been! Buona sera!” and with this parting allegation he lifted his hat and bowed stiffly.
“Felicissima notte, Nino,” she answered so low as to be almost inaudible.
Then he turned and passed out of the great glass doors which the porters held open for him.
Gemma went to her room, and, bursting into tears, sat for a long time alone, despairing, plunged in grief. She knew by her lover’s manner that he had forsaken her, and she felt herself alone in gigantic London, where the language, the people, the streets, all were strange to her. As she sat in her low easy chair, a slim, graceful figure in her pale-blue dinner-dress, she clenched her tiny hands till the nails embedded themselves in the palms, as she uttered with wild abandon the name of the man she so fondly loved.