She had to see me again, a week later, to talk about him. So she asked me to the opera. She had a box, and we were alone, and the notorious Lady Perth was two boxes away. But this was one of Carlotta's conventional perverse little acts, with her husband in France. She only wanted to talk to me about him. So she sat in the front of her box, leaning a little to the audience and talking sideways to me. Anyone would have known at once there was a _liaison_ between us, how _dangereuse_ they would never have guessed. For there, in the full view of the world--her world at least, not mine--she was talking sideways to me, saying in a hurried, yet stony voice: "What do you think of Luke?" She looked up at me heavily, with her sea-coloured eyes, waiting for my answer. "He's tremendously charming," I said, above the theatreful of faces. "Yes, he's that!" she replied, in the flat, plangent voice she had when she was serious, like metal ringing flat, with a strange far-reaching vibration. "Do you think he'll be happy?" "_Be_ happy!" I ejaculated. "When, _be_ happy?" "With me," she said, giving a sudden little snirt of laughter, like a schoolgirl, and looking up at me shyly, mischievously, anxiously. "If you make him," I said, still casual. "How can I make him?" She said it with flat, plangent earnestness. She was always like that, pushing me deeper in than I wanted to go. "Be happy yourself, I suppose: and quite sure about it. And then _tell_ him you're happy, and tell him he is too, and he'll be it." "Must I do all that?" she said rapidly. "Not otherwise?" I knew I was frowning at her, and she was watching my frown. "Probably not," I said roughly. "He'll never make up his mind about it himself." "How did you know?" she asked, as if it had been a mystery. "I didn't. It only seems to me like that." "Seems to you like that," she re-echoed, in that sad, clean monotone of finality, always like metal. I appreciate it in her, that she does not murmur or whisper. But I wished she left me alone, in that beastly theatre. She was wearing emeralds, on her snow-white skin, and leaning forward gazing fixedly down into the auditorium, as a crystal-gazer into a crystal. Heaven knows if she saw all those little facets of faces and plastrons. As for me, I knew that, like a sansculotte, I should never be king till breeches were off. "I had terrible work to make him marry me," she said, in her swift, clear low tones. "Why?" "He was frightfully in love with me. He _is_! But he thinks he's unlucky..." "Unlucky, how? In cards or in love?" I mocked. "In both," she said briefly, with sudden cold resentment at my flippancy. There was over her eyes a glaze of fear. "It's in their family." "What did you say to him?" I asked, rather laboured, feeling the dead weight. "I promised to have luck for two," she said. "And war was declared a fortnight later." "Ah, well!" I said. "That's the world's luck, not yours." "Quite!" she said. There was a pause.