They were both silent, while in their minds rose that “once before”: the roses blooming in the Sicilian garden, husbanded by bees; the young American doctor sent south to recover from a sickness; the romance of their hearts beating in unison with the romance of the place. Gradually her eyes fell from the doctor’s face. For, later, she had forgotten him, measured him by another and found him less than she desired. She had sent him away, the young American doctor of the Sicilian garden, and had never thought to ask herself before, whether she could regret it. Now she raised her eyes to his face and wondered whether she were regretting it. He was handsome and mundane. In those eight years he had pushed himself from obscurity to a point of worldly ease. Perhaps she had done that for him by sending him away! To her, now, though married, he was more interesting than ever before. What she had done to him then he had surmounted; and now, somehow, it seemed the gods had put the cards into his hands. Suddenly, while she was wondering, he leaned nearer to her and said: “You are miserable. I can tell it from the lines in your forehead. And your eyes are hot with fever.” He spoke impersonally; it was like the soothing hand of the physician to his patient. Simmons was laughing still more hilariously, and his neighbor, the Magnificent Wreck, was laughing with him; those near them were shouting and clapping their hands; they were urging him to do something. To his wife it all seemed silly. “Does _that_ worry you?” continued Vessinger, following her eyes. She looked at her husband again with a sudden sense of detachment from him. He was foolish, like a child, and she suspected why he was foolish and drank too much: he wished not to think. She despised his male way of trying to escape from himself. His was the man’s simple, coarse instinct--to drink, to laugh, to forget! Suddenly he was just a man in black and white, like all the others who had come to her that evening and said words and smiled and danced and gone away. He was just a man, like one-half creation. “Yes,” she replied steadily to the doctor. “I am miserable. Does it make you happy to know that?” She did not comprehend what inferences he might draw from the juxtaposition of acts and words. “In a way, it does,” he answered calmly. “But I shouldn’t let _that_ bother you. Our hostess, good woman, loves a laughing guest, and your husband is colossal. The best of men forget themselves, you know, and on the morrow they are ashamed. A good wife forgives--that is her _métier_.” The racket below increased until every one stopped his eating or his talk to find out what made the disturbance. Simmons was rising somewhat unsteadily to his feet. His tie had come undone. His large brown eyes, usually twinkling with gentle kindliness, flashed with the passion of the moment.