Fashion and Famine

by Ann S. Stephens

With the insidious tenderness which made this man so dangerous, he threw his arm gently around the strangely agitated woman, not in a way to arouse her apprehensions had she been the most fastidious being on earth, but respectfully, as if he felt that she required support. She was trembling from head to foot. He uttered a few soothing words, and bending down, kissed her forehead. Then her head fell upon his shoulder, and she burst into a passion of tears. Her being seemed shaken to its very centre; she murmured amid her tears soft words too low for him to hear. Her hand wove itself around his tighter and more passionately; she clung to him like a deserted child restored to its mother's bosom.

Libertine as he was, Leicester could not misunderstand the agitation that overwhelmed the stranger. It aroused all the sleeping romance—all the vivid imagination of his nature; unprincipled he certainly was, but not altogether without feeling. Surprise, gratified vanity, nay, some mysterious influence of which he was unaware, held the deep evil of his nature in abeyance. Strange as this woman's conduct had been, wild, incomprehensible as it certainly was, he could not think entirely ill of her. He would have laughed at another man in his place, had he entertained a doubt of her utter worthlessness; but there she lay against his heart, and spite of that, spite of a nature always ready to see the dark side of humanity, he could not force himself to treat her with disrespect. After all, there must have been some few sparks of goodness in that man's heart, or he could not so well have comprehended the better feelings of another.

She lay thus weeping and passive, circled by his arm; her tears seemed very sweet and blissful. Now and then she drew a deep, tremulous sigh, but no words were uttered. At length he broke the spell that controlled her with a question.

"Will you not tell me now, why you came for me, and your name? If not that, say where we have ever met before?"

She released herself gently from his arm at these words, and drew back to a corner of the seat. He had aroused her from the sweetest bliss ever known to a human heart. This one moment of delusion was followed by a memory of who she was, and why she sought him, so bitter and sharp that it chilled her through and through. There was no danger that he could recognize her voice then, even if he had known it before. Nothing could be more faint and changed than the tone in which she answered—

"In a little time you shall know all."

He would have drawn her toward him again, but she resisted the effort with gentle decision; and, completely lost in wonder, he waited the course this strange adventure might take.

The horses stopped before some large building, but even the outline was lost in that inky darkness; something more gloomy and palpable than the air loomed before them, and that was all Leicester could distinguish. He sat still and waited.

The carriage door was opened on the side where the female sat, and some words passed between her and a person outside, but she leaned forward, and had her tones been louder, they would have been drowned by the rain dashing over the carriage. The man to whom she had spoken closed the door and seemed to mount a flight of steps. Then followed the sound of an opening door, and after that a gleam of light now and then broke through a chink in that black mass, up and up, till far over head it gleamed through the blinds of a window, revealing the casement and nothing more.