He went to the club. It was open, there were lights in the windows; but he did not go in. For half an hour he roamed about the streets and in front of his garden, an endless half-hour. Let me wait another quarter of an hour, he thought, and he prolonged it to three quarters. Then he entered the garden, went up the steps and rang at his own door. The maid came and opened it, just put her head out and said: "Madam has long since...." Then she stopped and saw who he was. "I know, gone to bed," he answered. "Will you tell your mistress that her husband has come home." And the maid went. She knocked at her mistress's room and gave the message through the closed door: "I was to say that the master has come back." Her mistress asked from within: "What do you say, is your master come back? Who told you to say so?" "The master himself. He's standing outside." There are sounds of sore distraction in the mistress's room, hurried whispers, a door opening and closing again. Then all is still. And the master walks in. His wife receives him with death in her heart. "The club was shut," he says at once, from pity and compassion. "I sent you a message so as not to alarm you." She falls into a chair, comforted, relieved, saved. The blissful feeling makes her kind heart overflow and she is solicitous about her husband: "You are so pale. Is there anything wrong with you, dear?" "I am not cold," he answers. "But has anything happened? Your face looks so strangely drawn." The husband answers: "No, I'm smiling. This is going to be my way of smiling. I want this grimace to be my special property." She listens to his short, hoarse words and doesn't understand them, can't make them out at all. What can he mean? But suddenly he throws his arms around her with a grip of iron, with terrible force, and whispers close against her face: "What do you say to giving him a pair of horns ... the man who's just gone ... give him a pair of horns, eh?" She utters a scream and calls the maid. He lets her go with a quiet, dry laugh, with his mouth agape and slapping both his thighs. In the morning the wife's kind heart is again uppermost and she says to her husband: "You had an extraordinary attack last night; it's over now, but you're still pale today." "Yes," he replies, "it takes it out of one to be witty at my age. I'll never do it again." * * * * * But, after having spoken of many kinds of Love, Friar Vendt tells of yet another kind and says: What rapture there is in _one_ kind of Love! The young Lord and Lady had just come home, their long wedding tour was at an end and they settled down to rest. A shooting star fell above their roof.