"It might have been her brother--he was certainly foreign--but no, it could not have been a brother." And she looked down and smiled knowingly.
Tristram felt gradually wild with the stings her words were planting, and then his anger rebounded upon herself.

Little natures always miscalculate the effect of their actions, as factors in their desires, for their ultimate ends.
Laura only longed--after hurting Tristram as a punishment--to get him back again; but she was not clever enough to know that to make him mad with jealousy about his wife was not the way.
"I don't understand what you wish to insinuate, Laura," he said in a contemptuous voice; "but whatever it is, it is having no effect upon me.
I absolutely adore my wife, and know everything she does or does not do." "Oh! the poor, angry darling, there, there!" she laughed, spitefully, "and was It jealous! Well, It shan't be teased.

But what a clever husband, to know all about his wife! He should be put in a glass case in a museum!" And she got up and left him alone.
Tristram would like to have killed some one--he did not know whom--this foreign man, "Mimo," most likely: he had not forgotten the name! If his pride had permitted him he would have gone up to Zara, who had now retired to her room, and asked straight out for an explanation.

He would if he had been sensible have simply said he was unhappy, and he would have asked her to reassure him.

It would all have been perfectly simple and soon ended if treated with common sense.