There was the slightest quivering of Ophelia’s lids. It was as though in this trite dramatic incident she was preparing to crush her husband’s sentiments. She kept her hand upon the handle of the door, stiffening herself upon her arm. Her eyes had grown peculiarly dull and sullen. “I intend changing my régime,” she said. “Of course, dear, if—” “I am sleeping with Mabel in the ‘blue room.’” It was a simple thrust enough, but deep in meaning. Ophelia watched the man’s face much as Cleopatra might have studied the face of a slave poisoned in a wanton thirst for knowledge. Her voice sounded strangely harsh and resonant, a discord the more telling upon the man’s hypersensitive brain. “If you wish it so.” “If I had not wished it,” she interjected, irritably, “I should have arranged otherwise. Order Thompson to bring me up some hot water when you go down-stairs. I can’t talk to you now; it always bores me to talk after travelling.” XXIX DINNER that evening proved a lugubrious and problematic meal. The conversation was interjectory and spasmodic, the topics comet-like in character, smiting vaguely through a void of silence. Gabriel attempted a hypocritic cheerfulness for the better masking of his own discomfort. His vivacity inspired no feminine response. He was compelled to undergo the ordeal of being studied in detail by his wife and her brown-haired friend. From the first handshake he had conceived a sincere disrelish for Miss Mabel Saker, and her critical silence that evening did not tend to dispossess him of his antipathy. He was not grieved when the white napkins were laid upon the table and the women carried their perfumed persons to the privacy of the drawing-room. Miss Saker bared the keyboard of the piano and suffered her slim fingers to produce musical etchings in black and white. She was considered something of a wit in her own circle, her humor emulating the spangled, short-skirted brilliance of the variety stage. Miss Saker was in a mischievous mood that evening, and the starched artificiality of the dinner-hour emphasized the reaction. Putting down sundry chords in the base with melodramatic thunder, she glanced over her shoulder with a theatrical frown. “Tragedy, my dear—tragedy,” she said; “the man is in a deep, deceitful mood. He has something ponderous and painful upon his conscience.” Ophelia turned herself in her lounge-chair and lay with one cheek on the cushion, a diamond crescent shining in her hair. “He is too talkative,” she remarked. “True, O queen. When a man talks thus”—and Miss Saker evolved a rackety and hysterical air—“you may bet your boots his nerves are on the tingle. He is hiding something under his coat.” “It was easy to see that from the first,” remarked the wife. “He went green when he saw us in the hall.” “Rather a shock, perhaps. The man had been out all day; I can guess where.”