"But it wasn't uncomplimentary! It was just a silly mistake anyone might
make--" He stopped abruptly, for there were tears in her eyes--and
instantly his tenderness infolded her like sunshine. But even while he
was making her talk of other things--the heat, or the landscape--he was
a little preoccupied; he was trying to explain this tiny, ridiculous,
lovely unreasonableness, by tracking it back to some failure of
sensitiveness on his own part. It occurred to him that he could do this
better if he were by himself--not sitting beside her, faintly conscious
of her tenseness. So he said, abruptly, "Star, if you don't mind, I'll
go and have a smoke."

"All right," she said; "give me the paper; I haven't looked at the news
for days!" She was trembling a little. The mistake of a silly girl had
had, at first, no significance, it was just, as it always is to the
newly married woman, amusing to be supposed not to be married! But that
Maurice, knowing of the mistake, had not mentioned its absurdity, woke
an uneasy consciousness that he had thought it might annoy her! Why
should it annoy her?--unless the reason of the mistake was as obvious to
him as to the girl?--whom he had found attractive enough to dance with
three times! It was as if a careless hand had pushed open a closed door,
and given Maurice's wife a glimpse of a dark landscape, the very
existence of which her love had so vehemently denied.

An hour later, however, when Maurice returned, she was serene again.
Love had closed the door--bolted it! barred it! and the gray landscape
of dividing years was forgotten. And as her face had cleared, so had
his. He had explained her annoyance by calling himself a clod! "She
hated not to be thought married--of _course_!" What a brute he was not
to have recognized the subtle loveliness of a sensitiveness like that!