There was nothing to tell her that she had made the most important decision of her life, nothing except a weight of dullness and disappointment. The Gardens which had been so brightly beautiful seemed tawdry. She noticed for the first time that the path was littered with crumpled paper and orange peel. Moreover, it was muddy and had stained the hem of her yellow dress.

'Will you be so good as to tell me the meaning of this extraordinary scene?' Aaron spoke quietly, but his authority, which he knew had for a moment been shaken, sharpened his tone.

She drooped against his shoulder. 'I don't know. I'm so tired, Papa, please don't question me.'

'No nervous vapors if you please. I am at a loss to understand your conduct. Am I right in conjecturing that you saw this—this fellow for the first time tonight at the theater? And that he was one of the officers in the next box?'

She inclined her head.

'—And that he made sheep's eyes at you, and you were seized with some inexplicable impulse and made them back?' 'Don't please. It wasn't like that.'

'Like what, then? Do you expect me to mince words when I find that my daughter has made a vulgar assignation in front of her father and her betrothed? You got rid of Joseph very neatly, did you not? I met him at the gate hunting for your pearl ring, which I now see rests in its usual place on your finger. You have disgusted me!'

His scorn shriveled her. She could no longer recapture the glowing beauty of those moments of communion and realization. She felt blank and terribly tired.

'I'm sorry, Papa,' she whispered. 'Please don't be angry with me any more. It's finished.

Aaron patted her hand. He had been more upset and hurt by her behavior than he wished to remember. He realized that, despite the apparent impossibility of the thing, this lanky captain had fallen in love with Theo, and that she had not been unresponsive. He would have liked to feel contempt for him; such a display of feeling as the fellow had put into that crying of her name was better suited to effeminate dolts like poets than to a soldier. Still, Aaron seldom underestimated an opponent and he was an accomplished judge of character. He knew that this tuppenny-ha'penny captain, for all his rough speech and rustic air, was nobody's fool. While he doubted the danger of another meeting between the two, for Theo had come to her senses and Lewis had accepted his dismissal, nevertheless he intended to make sure.

In the meantime, they must be getting back to their party who would think this prolonged absence exceedingly strange.