oman met her soon after parting from
Pasquale and besought her to give me up. She did not know what to do.
Poor child, how should she have known? On the previous evening I had
told her she was to marry me. She was ready to obey. She went to bed
thinking that she was to marry me. In the morning she went for her music
lesson. Pasquale was waiting for her. They walked for some distance down
the road. He hailed a cab and drove away with her.

"He said he loved me," said Carlotta, "and he kissed me, and he told
me I must go away with him to Paris and marry him. And I felt all weak,
like that--" she dropped her arms helplessly in an expressive gesture,
"and so what could I do?"

"Didn't you think, Carlotta, that I might be sorry--perhaps unhappy?" I
asked as gently as I could.

"He said you would be quite happy with the other woman."

"Did you believe him?"

"That's why I said I have been very wicked," Carlotta answered, simply.

She went on with her story--an old, miserable, detestable, execrable
story. At first all went merrily. Then she fell ill in Paris. It was
her first acquaintance with the northern winter. Her throat proved to be
delicate and she was laid up with bronchitis. To men of Pasquale's type,
a woman ill is of no more use than a spavined horse or a broken-down
motor-car. More than that, she becomes an infernal nuisance. It was
in his temperament to perform sporadic acts of fantastic chivalry. It
appealed to something romantic, theatrical, in his facile nature. But to
devote himself to a woman in sickness--that was different. The fifteenth
century Italian hated like the devil continued association with pain. He
would have thrown his boots to a beggar, but he would have danced in his
palace over the dungeons where his brother rotted in obscurity.

So poor Carlotta was neglected, and began to eat the bread of
disillusion. When she got well, there was a faint recrudescence of
affection. Has not this story been written a million miserable
times? Why should I rend my heart again by retelling it? Wild rages,
jealousies, quarrels, tears--

"And then one day he said, 'You damned little fool, I am sick to death
of you,' and he went away, and I never saw him again. He wrote and he
sent his valet to put me in the pension."

"And yet, Carlotta," said I bitterly, "you would go back to him if he
sent for you?"

She sprang forward and gripped me by the arm--I was sitting quite close
to her--and her face wore the t