“Why should it distress her?”

“Well, you see,” I began, not slackening the pace “there are formalities—­”

“Ah, I know,” he interrupted, with an impatient laugh.  “Keredec once took me to a marionette show—­all the little people strung on wires; they couldn’t move any other way.  And so you mustn’t talk to a woman until somebody whose name has been spoken to you speaks yours to her!  Do you call that a rule of nature?”

“My dear boy,” I laughed in some desperation, “we must conform to it, ordinarily, no matter whose rule it is.”

“Do you think Madame d’Armand cares for little forms like that?” he asked challengingly.

“She does,” I assured him with perfect confidence.  “And, for the hundredth time, you must have seen how you troubled her.”

“No,” he returned, with the same curious obstinacy, “I don’t believe it.  There was something, but it wasn’t trouble.  We looked straight at each other; I saw her eyes plainly, and it was—­” he paused and sighed, a sudden, brilliant smile upon his lips—­“it was very—­it was very strange!”

There was something so glad and different in his look that—­like any other dried-up old blunderer in my place—­I felt an instant tendency to laugh.  It was that heathenish possession, the old insanity of the risibles, which makes a man think it a humourous thing that his friend should be discovered in love.

But before I spoke, before I quite smiled outright, I was given the grace to see myself in the likeness of a leering stranger trespassing in some cherished inclosure:  a garden where the gentlest guests must always be intruders, and only the owner should come.  The best of us profane it readily, leaving the coarse prints of our heels upon its paths, mauling and man-handling the fairy blossoms with what pudgy fingers!  Comes the poet, ruthlessly leaping the wall and trumpeting indecently his view-halloo of the chase, and, after him, the joker, snickering and hopeful of a kill among the rose-beds; for this has been their hunting-ground since the world began.  These two have made us miserably ashamed of the divine infinitive, so that we are afraid to utter the very words “to love,” lest some urchin overhear and pursue us with a sticky forefinger and stickier taunts.  It is little to my credit that I checked the silly impulse to giggle at the eternal marvel, and went as gently as I could where I should not have gone at all.

“But if you were wrong,” I said, “if it did distress her, and if it happened that she has already had too much that was distressing in her life—­”

“You know something about her!” he exclaimed.  “You know—­”

“I do not,” I interrupted in turn.  “I have only a vague guess; I may be altogether mistaken.”

“What is it that you guess?” he demanded abruptly.  “Who made her suffer?”

“I think it was her husband,” I said, with a lack of discretion for which I was instantly sorry, fearing with reason that I had added a final blunder to the long list of the afternoon.  “That is,” I added, “if my guess is right.”