"
"Diana!" Max spoke incredulously. "You can't believe--you can't think
that!"
"But I do think that!"--imperiously. "What else can I think?" Her
long-pent jealousy had broken forth at last, and the words raced from
her lips. "You refused to come when I asked you--offered me Jerry as
an escort instead. Jerry!"--scornfully--"I'm to be content with my
husband's secretary, I suppose, so that my husband himself can dance
attendance on Adrienne de Gervais?"
Max stood motionless, his eyes like steel.
"You are being--rather childish," he said at last, with slow
deliberation. His cool, contemptuous tones cut like a whip.
She had been rapidly losing her self-command, and, reading the intense
anger beneath his outward calm, she made an effort to pull herself
together.
"Childish?" she retorted. "Yes, I suppose it is childish to mind being
deceived. I ought to have been prepared for it--expected it."
At the note of suffering in her voice the anger died swiftly out of his
eyes.
"You don't mean that, Diana," he said, more gently.
"Yes, I do. You warned me--didn't you?--that there would be things you
couldn't explain. I suppose"--bitterly--"this is one of them!"
"No, it is not. I can explain this. I didn't intend coming to-night,
as I told you. But Miss de Gervais rang up from the theatre and begged
me to come, so, of course, as she wished it--"
"'As she wished it!' Are her wishes, then, of so much more importance
than mine?"
Errington was silent for a moment.
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