"No. But it's since then that I've read the poems again. You see, you tell the public so much--"
"That you think you have the right to guess the rest?" He paused, then added, with impatience, "Don't guess, Lady Kitty. You have everything that life can give you. Let my secrets alone."
There was silence. Kitty looking round her saw that Madeleine Alcot was entertaining her other guests, and that she and Cliffe were unobserved. Suddenly Cliffe bent towards her, and said, with roughness, his face struggling to conceal the feeling behind it:
"You heard--and you believed--that I tormented her--that I killed her?"
The anguish in his eyes seemed to strike a certain answering fire from Kitty's.
"--that a man should be--an inhuman beast--if he were jealous--and desperate. You can sympathize with these things?"
She drew a long breath, and threw away the cigarette she had been holding suspended in her small fingers.
"Because," he hesitated, "your own life has been so happy?"
She evaded him. "Don't you think that jealousy will soon be as dead as--saying your prayers and going to church? I never meet anybody that cares enough--to be jealous."
She spoke first with passionate force, then with contempt, glancing across the room at Madeleine Alcot. Cliffe saw the look, and remembered that Mrs. Alcot's husband, a distinguished treasury official, had been for years the intimate friend of a very noble and beautiful woman, herself unhappily married. There was no scandal in the matter, though much talk. Mrs. Alcot meanwhile had her own affairs; her husband and she were apparently on friendly terms; only neither ever spoke of the other; and their relations remained a mystery.
"And yet you said you could understand?--such things didn't seem strange to you."
"Did I? It's like the people who think they could act or sing, if they only had the chance. I choose to think I could feel. And of course I couldn't. We've lost the power. All the old, horrible, splendid things are dead and done with."
"And the old poems! _You'll_ never write like that again."
"God forbid!" said Cliffe, under his breath. Then as Kitty rose he followed her with his eyes. "Lady Kitty, you've thrown me a challenge that you hardly understand. Some day I must answer it."