"I don't know what you mean," said Lily. "I don't know anything about flirtations."
This seemed to amuse Rose-Black as an uncommonly fine piece of American humor, which was then just beginning to make its way with the English. "Oh, but come, now, you don't expect me to believe that, you know. If you won't tell me, suppose you show me what an American flirtation is like. Suppose we get up a flirtation. How should you begin?"
The girl rose with a more imposing air than Elmore could have imagined of her stature; but almost any woman can be awful in emergencies. "I should begin by bidding you good-evening," she answered, and swept out of the room.
Elmore felt as if he had been left alone with a man mortally hurt in combat, and were likely to be arrested for the deed. He gazed with fascination upon Rose-Black, and wondered to see him stir, and at last rise, and with some incoherent words to them, get himself away. He dared not lift his gaze to the man's eyes, lest he should see there some reflection of the pain that filled his own. He would have gone after him, and tried to say something in condolence, but he was quite helpless to move; and as he sat still, gazing at the door through which Rose-Black disappeared, Mrs. Elmore said quietly:--
"Well, really, I think that ought to be the last of him. You see, she's quite able to take care of herself when she knows her ground. You can't say that she has thrown the brunt of this affair upon you, Owen."
"I am not so sure of that," sighed Elmore. "I think I suffer less when I do it than when I see it. It's horrible."
"He deserved it, every bit," returned his wife.
"Oh, I dare say," Elmore granted. "But the sight even of justice isn't pleasant, I find."
"I don't understand you, Owen. How can you care so much for this impudent wretch's little snub, and yet be so indifferent about refusing Captain Ehrhardt?"
"I'm not indifferent about it, my dear. I know that I did right, but I don't know that I could do right under the same circumstances again."
In fact there were times when Elmore found almost insupportable the absolute conclusion to which that business had come. It is hard to believe that anything has come to an end in this world. For a time, death itself leaves the ache of an unsatisfied expectation, as if somehow the interrupted life must go on, and there is no change we make or suffer which is not denied by the sensation of daily habit. If Ehrhardt had really come back from the vague limbo to which he had been so inexorably relegated, he might only have restored the original situation in all its discomfort and apprehension; yet maintaining, as he did, this perfect silence and absence, he established a hold upon Elmore's imagination which deepened because he could not discuss the matter frankly with his wife. He weakly feared to let her know what was passing in his thoughts, lest some misconception of hers should turn them into self-accusal or urge him to some attempt at the reparation towards which he wavered. He really could have done nothing that would not have made the matter worse, and he confined himself to speculating upon the character and history of the man whom he knew only by the incoherent hearsay of two excited women, and by the brief record of hope and passion left in the notes which Lily treasured somewhere among the archives of a young girl's triumphs. He had a morbid curiosity to see these letters again, but he dared not ask for them; and indeed it would have been an idle self-indulgence: he remembered them perfectly well. Seeing Lily so indifferent, it was characteristic of him, in that safety from consequences which he chiefly loved, that he should tacitly constitute himself, in some sort, the champion of her rejected suitor, whose pain he luxuriously fancied in all its different stages and degrees. His indolent pity even developed into a sort of self-righteous abhorrence of the girl's hardness. But this was wholly within himself, and could work no sort of harm. If he never ventured to hint these feelings to his wife, he was still further from confessing them to Lily; but once he approached the subject with Hoskins in a well-guarded generality relating to the different kinds of sensibility developed by the European and American civilization. A recent suicide for love which excited all Venice at that time--an Austrian officer hopelessly attached to an Italian girl had shot himself--had suggested their talk, and given fresh poignancy to the misgivings in Elmore's mind.