It's rude not to repeat it when I ask you." "I didn't mean to be rude." "Then repeat what you said to yourself." "Do you wish me to ?" he asked, raising his eyes so gravely that the smile faded from lip and voice when she answered: "I beg your pardon, Captain Selwyn.

I did not know you were serious." "Oh, I'm not," he returned lightly, "I'm never serious.

No man who soliloquises can be taken seriously.

Don't you know, Miss Erroll, that the crowning absurdity of all tragedy is the soliloquy ?" Her smile became delightfully uncertain; she did not quite understand him--though her instinct warned her that, for a second, something had menaced their understanding.
Riding forward with him through the crisp sunshine of mid-December, the word "tragedy" still sounding in her ears, her thoughts reverted naturally to the only tragedy besides her own which had ever come very near to her--his own.
Could he have meant _that_?
Did people mention such things after they had happened?
Did they not rather conceal them, hide them deeper and deeper with the aid of time and the kindly years for a burial past all recollection?
Troubled, uncomfortably intent on evading every thought or train of ideas evoked, she put her mount to a gallop.

But thought kept pace with her.
She was, of course, aware of the situation regarding Selwyn's domestic affairs; she could not very well have been kept long in ignorance of the facts; so Nina had told her carefully, leaving in the young girl's mind only a bewildered sympathy for man and wife whom a dreadful and incomprehensible catastrophe had overtaken; only an impression of something new and fearsome which she had hitherto been unaware of in the world, and which was to be added to her small but, unhappily, growing list of sad and incredible things.
The finality of the affair, according to Nina, was what had seemed to her the most distressing--as though those two were already dead people.
She was unable to understand it.