to rely absolutely
on her single-minded attachment, he foresaw that the dance that evening
would offer few opportunities, if any, of repairing his omission, and he
was accordingly not in the best of moods to enjoy it.

As the sufferer from some fatal disease is the last to be convinced
that his condition is hopeless, so the ardent lover, for whom things are
going none too smoothly, is the last to be persuaded that he is really
losing ground.

He will ascribe his rebuffs to a passing whim on the part of his
beloved, to a momentary lapse in her customary humour, to her food, to a
desire on her part to test him, to transitory evil influences from
outside, to the thermometer, the barometer, the moon!--in fact to
anything, except to the possibility that she could actually have cooled
towards him; and the more overpowering his arrogance happens to be, the
more complex and subtle will be the explanations which his imagination
will furnish for the unpleasant change in his affairs.

That Denis was beginning to feel a deadly hatred for Lord Henry scarcely
requires to be stated. In fact, this feeling in him was so
irrepressible, so rapacious, that it grasped even at morsels of
nourishment it could not obtain, in the desire to strengthen itself.
Thus he had actually come to believe that Lord Henry was a charlatan; he
was prepared to prove that he had immoral intentions against every girl
in his immediate neighbourhood, and he was completely satisfied that,
like Mrs. Delarayne, Lord Henry was decades older than he admitted.

Meanwhile, however, a thousand petty but significant trifles showed
Denis that he no longer exercised that power over Leonetta, and could
no longer claim that whole-hearted devotion from her, which had marked
their relationship only a day or two previously. The girl no longer gave
him her entire attention, neither did she appear to tax her brain to the
same extent as theretofore in order to engross his every thought. From a
solid union which defied all interference, and which therefore made all
interested spectators feel uneasy, their relationship had relaxed into a
harmless and hearty friendship. But it was Leonetta who was shaking
herself loose, and the more tightly Denis clung to the strands of their
former intimacy, the more tenuous these seemed to become,--just as if
his hold on them were more frantic than their strength could bear.

These signs were naturally not lost on Cleopatra. On the contrary, she