With instinctive feminine guile she leaned towards him in an attitude so beautiful, so appealing that even now he was moved. But with this emotion came, too, a subtle if now fainter sense of degradation that he was susceptible to this dangerous fascination, with a painful consciousness of how wide a moral gulf had opened between them by the anger and vulgar jealousy which Ninitta displayed. It is not impossible, too, that his instinctive clinging to Helen was a stronger power than he knew; while still through all his mingled emotions ran the resolve he had made to give himself up to his old betrothed.
"No," he said; yet as he moved slowly towards the door he had the air of a man who still deliberates.
She threw herself back in her seat with a touching gesture of despair, but also with a gleam of malice in her eyes, which he, turning with his hand upon the latch, caught and understood.
"No," he repeated with final decision. "No, no!"
XVIII.
BEDECKING ORNAMENTS OF PRAISE.
Love's Labor's Lost; ii.—I.
Fenton had returned to Boston with his bride, but as yet Helen had not seen him. One morning late in March, however, he came to call.
"I could not come before," he said after the first greeting, "'I have married a wife,' and the amount of arrangement and adjustment implied in that statement is simply astounding."
"I am glad to see you at last," she returned. "And your wife, is she well?"
"My wife," replied he, with a little hesitancy over the unfamiliar term, "is well. Cannot you come to see us before that dreadful reception through which I am to be dragged? I'd like you to know Edith in a different way from the crowd."