Still she clung to him—put her old life resolutely aside, and looked only forward to the time when he would take her from that dreary wilderness and go out into the world where she had first keenly enjoyed the sweets of refined life.
She had fine talents, a splendid education, and was well endowed for any station in which destiny could have placed her. Let me do her the justice to acknowledge that under better influences she would probably have been simply a far-sighted, diplomatic woman of the world, reducing all about her to obedience by the incomprehensible fascination which made all men who approached her admirers or slaves. Satisfied with her position and influence, the under depths of her nature would have been so little excited, that in all probability she herself would have been forever unconscious of the dark traits which lay hidden in her restless heart.
But it was useless to speculate upon what she might have been. She was—alas! for her—Philip Yates's wife, far from any who could have aided her, even if she would have permitted the slightest interposition in her fate. Doomed to obey his commands, she was apparently ready enough to gratify him, and managed, even in that secluded spot, to win all the pleasure and cheerfulness out of her life which it was possible to obtain.
She dressed herself, according to her promise. When her toilet was completed, it was astonishing to see how brilliantly she came out of the cloud which had appeared to envelop her. Her face caught its most girlish expression—the large eyes grew luminous—the smile about her mouth was playful and sweet. Those tresses of billowy hair, woven in luxuriant braids back of her head, would of themselves have relieved her face from any charge of plainness.
This woman put out her candle and turned to the window. For many moments she stood looking out into the glorious night and watching every effect with the sensations an artist could have understood.
Then, in spite of herself, back into the past fled her soul, and the chill waves of memory rushed over her. She flung her white arms aloft, and cried out in her pain. Once more that man's name died on her lips in a passionate echo, which frightened even herself: "Laurence! Laurence!"
A burst of merriment from below recalled her to the present, and the hard destiny which lay before her. With the strong self-command acquired in her strange life, she banished from her features every trace of care; the soft light crept into her eyes again, the pleasant smile settled upon her lips.
She took from the table a thin blue scarf, and, flinging it gracefully over her shoulders, as we see drapery in Guido's pictures, passed down stairs toward the room where her husband and his guests were seated, already, as she could detect by the broken words which reached her ear, occupied with the fatal games which had driven so many men to ruin within those very walls.