“There’s something behind that girl’s face,” I persisted. “For all her softness and sweetness, I’ll warrant she’s hard and bitter underneath.”

Nathaniel softly whistled The World Turned Upside Down to show his lack of interest in my opinion. When I would have said more, he stopped me with an airy wave of his hand. “Never mind, Peter. Never mind. I liked her.”

I saw, then, that he believed me to be jealous of him, and that whatever I might say would only nourish that belief. I felt myself burdened by a singular discomfort; for I longed to express myself more forcefully about Marie de Sabrevois; yet was unwilling to do so for fear the very expressing might cause a breach between Nathaniel and me.

My discomfort became even greater on the following evening. During the afternoon Nathaniel had left me at my father’s agents and strolled off on private business of his own. I returned to our lodgings, expecting to find him there; but our rooms were empty. He might, I thought, have met a friend and dined with him. Later I told myself, though with some misgivings, that he must have gone on, after dinner, to a play. But as midnight passed, and then one o’clock, my misgivings became almost a panic. I visualized him beaten by footpads; run through by one of the young English bucks who were as free with their swords and their tempers as they were with their morals and other people’s money. I saw him, in my mind’s eye, trampled into the mud of the turbulent, roaring Strand, or floating in the filthy waters of the Thames.

I must have fallen asleep around two. An hour later I wakened to see Nathaniel undoing his stock before the mirror, as unconcerned as though just back from an afternoon stroll in Hyde Park.

I lay for a while and watched him. I seemed to see, about his face, a little heaviness that was new to me. From time to time, as he laid off his garments in the candlelight, he smiled the fixed and foolish smile with which one contemplates, when alone, a pleasure more agreeable than amusing. Even before I caught from him a faint, elusive perfume of violets, I knew he had been with Marie de Sabrevois.

I coughed to let him know I was awake; but the only sign he gave of hearing me was to compose his face at once, as though his happy memories were sacred to himself alone. Seeing that he had no intention of saying anything, I asked him mildly whether he had enjoyed his evening. Nathaniel, rapt, at that moment, in examining in the mirror an imaginary something on his cheek, nodded and mumbled, and I took his mumble for assent.

“I suppose,” I said, still good-naturedly, “I suppose you wouldn’t want to tell me about it.”