“What made you attire yourself in all this splendour?” I asked, laughing.  The wise man does not carry sentiment too far.  He keeps it like a little precious nugget of pure gold; the less wise beats it out into a flabby film.

“I don’t know,” she said, shifting her position and casting a critical glance at her bodice.  “All kinds of funny little feminine vanities.  Perhaps I wanted to see whether I hadn’t gone off.  Perhaps I wanted to try to feel good-looking even if I wasn’t.  Perhaps I thought my dear old Majy was sick to death of the hospital uniform perfumed with disinfectant.  Perhaps it was just a catlike longing for comfort.  Anyhow, I’m glad you like me.”

“My dear Betty,” said I, “I adore you.”

“And I you,” she laughed.  “So there’s a pair of us.”

She lit a cigarette and sipped her coffee.  Then, breaking a short silence: 

“I hope you quite understand, dear, what I said about Leonard Boyce.  I shouldn’t like to leave you with the smallest little bit of a wrong impression.”

“What wrong impression could I possibly have?” I asked disingenuously.

“You might think that I was still in love with him.”

“That would be absurd,” said I.

“Utterly absurd.  I should feel it to be almost an insult if you thought anything of the kind.  Long before my marriage things that had happened had killed all such feelings outright.”  She paused for a few seconds and her brow darkened, just as it had done when she had spoken of him in the days immediately preceding her marriage with Willie Connor.  Presently it cleared.  “The whole beginning and end of my present feelings,” she continued, “is that I’m glad the man I once cared for has won such high distinction, and I’m sorry that such a brave soldier should be wounded.”

I could do nothing else than assure her of my perfect understanding.  I upbraided myself as a monster of indelicacy for my touch of doubt before dinner; also for a devilish and malicious suspicion that flitted through my brain while she was cataloguing her possible reasons for putting on the old evening dress.  The thought of Betty’s beautiful arm and the man’s bull-neck was a shivering offence.  I craved purification.

“If you’ve finished your coffee,” I said, “let us go into the drawing-room and have some music.”

She rose with the impulsiveness of a child told that it can be excused, and responded startlingly to my thought.

“I think we need it,” she said.

In the drawing-room I swung my chair so that I could watch her hands on the keys.  She was a good musician and had the well-taught executant’s certainty and grace of movement.  It may be the fancy of an outer Philistine, but I love to forget the existence of the instrument and to feel the music coming from the human finger-tips.  She found a volume of Chopin’s Nocturnes on the rest.  In fact she had left it there a fortnight before, the last