A girl in a red dress, who had been kneeling on the rug before the fire, rose to her feet as he came in and uttered a blithesome greeting.
"At last!" she said. "So here you are, monsieur! I was wondering what had become of you, and thought you had deserted me altogether!"
"Could I do that?" said Hubert, in a tone in which mock gallantry was strangely mingled with a tenderness which was altogether passionate and earnest. "Do you really think that I ever could do that?"
The girl he spoke to was Cynthia West.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Cynthia West made a delightful picture as she stood in the glow of the firelight and the rose-shaded lamps. Her dress, of deep red Indian silk, partly covered with puffings of soft-looking net of the same shade, was cut low, to show her beautiful neck and throat; the sleeves were very narrow, so that the whole length of her finely-shaped arm could be seen. Her dusky hair gave her all the stateliness of a coronet; swept away from her neck to the top of her head, it left only a few stray curls to shadow with bewitching lightness and vagueness the smooth surface of the exquisite nape. What was even more remarkable in Cynthia than the beauty of her face was the perfection of every line and contour of her body; the supple, swelling, lissom figure was full of absolute grace; she could not have been awkward if she had tried. It was the characteristic that chiefly earned her the admiration of men; women looked more often at her face.
"Are you alone?" said Hubert, smiling, and holding out both his hands, in which she impulsively placed her own.
"Quite alone. Madame has gone out; only the servants are in the house. How charming! We can have a good long chat about everything!"
"Everything!" said Hubert, sinking with a sigh of relief into the low chair that she drew forward. "I shall be only too happy. I have stagnated since I saw you last—which was in March, I believe—an age ago! It is now April, and I am absolutely ignorant as to what has been going on during the last few weeks."