His attitude was as though he were cowed by my presence. He remembered our last meeting.
In a moment, however, he recovered his self-possession, turned his back upon me, and strolled away beside the woman who had usurped my place.
CHAPTER XII
CARRIES ME ON BOARD THE "VISPERA"
Faces, even expressions, may lie, but eyes never learn the knack of falsehood. A man may commit follies; but once cured, those follies expand his nature. With a woman, sad to tell, follies are always debasing. It was, I knew, a folly to love Ernest Cameron.
Life is always disappointing. The shattering of our idols, the revelation of the shallowness of friendship, the losing faith in those we love, and the witnessing of their fall from that pedestal whereon we placed them in our own exalted idealisation—all is disappointing.
I stood gazing after him as he strode down the great room with its bejewelled and excited crowd, in which the chevalier d'industrie and the déclassée woman jostled against pickpockets and the men who gamble at Aix, Ostend, Namur or Spa, as the seasons come and go—that strange assembly of courteous Italians, bearded Russians, well-groomed Englishmen, and women painted, powdered and perfumed.
I held my breath; my heart beat so violently that I could hear it above the babel of voices about me. I suffered the most acute agony. Of late I had been always thinking of him—asleep, dreaming—always dreaming of him. Always the same pang of regret was within my heart—regret that I had allowed him to go away without a word, without telling him how madly, how despairingly I loved him.
Life without him was a hopeless blank, yet it was all through my vanity, my wretched pride, my invincible self-love. I was now careless, indifferent, inconsequential, my only thought being of him. His coldness, his disdain was killing me. When his eyes had met mine in surprise, they were strange, Sphinx-like, and mysterious.
Yet at that moment I did not care what he might say to me. I only wished to hear him speaking to me; to hear the sound of his voice, and to know that he cared enough for me to treat me as a human being.