To which there was a general assent, only Miss James whispered again to Mr. Tremain:
"You will have no temptation to draw you from your allegiance to your Baby-ish sweetheart, Mr. Tremain. Mdlle. Lamien can scarcely offer any counter attractions, as the Countess, to Baby, as Léonie."
Then with a quick upward look and the least perceptible halt: "How would it be, I wonder, if our capricious leading lady were here in person?"
The glance she gave him was brief; but in the second that her eyes scanned his face, she noted the blood steal slowly into his cheeks, and the lines deepen about his mouth, and with an angry impotent throb at her heart she realised his secret, and the hopelessness of her plans and desires. She turned away however, as the gong sounded, with a light laugh, despite the dull heavy sense of her own impuissance.
Mr. Tremain was not long in completing his toilette that evening, and when he came downstairs and made his way to the library in search of a book, it was with the purpose of half an hour's quiet reading before dinner. He crossed the room to the low book-cases that lined one side, and selecting his volume turned back to the fireplace, where a low reading-lamp on the sofa-table made an inviting resting-place.
He had thought himself quite alone, and was consequently not a little surprised to see within the shadow of the chimney recess, opposite to him, the dark quiet figure of Mdlle. Lamien. He put down his book with a half-sigh, and approached her; not even at the sacrifice of his dearest self-indulgence could Mr. Tremain be discourteous to a lady, still less to a stranger and a dependent. Moreover, he acknowledged to himself that Mdlle. Lamien exercised a distinct and strange kind of spell over him, reminding him in some occult mysterious way of Patricia, though why and wherefore he was at a loss to explain.
It was not that these two women—who had so little in common, whose lives were as wide apart as the poles, and whose interests were as diversely opposite as well could be—had ever met; and yet—such is the strong personal magnetism of certain natures—Philip, though he had spoken but twice to Mimi's governess, felt the sense of her power over him; a power so subtle, and yet so strong as to amount almost to physical force; while always with the sense of this domination came the thought of Patricia.
Mdlle. Lamien was sitting where first he remembered seeing her, well within the shadowed recess; her face, even in the subdued light of the single lamp, looked paler than ever, perhaps because its waxen pallor was touched by a shade of red in the cheeks; the kindly shadows hid the painful mark that disfigured one of them, but the light, catching the silver of the wavy hair beneath the falling lace folds, played about it, and across the dark sombre eyes, and thin hands that lay clasped with a sorrowful droop on her knees.
As Philip drew near to her, some polite words of salutation on his lips, she suddenly raised her head, and turning it more fully towards the light, smiled at him. It was wonderful, the effect of her smile; in a moment, as it flashed across her face, it transfigured it wholly, and restored, once more, somewhat of the youth and beauty of bygone days.
Mr. Tremain stood spell-bound; once again there swept across him that strange intangible something, that reflex of Patricia, that evanescent likeness, gone as soon as caught, yet so tantalising in its reality. As he stood silent, amazed, and yet in a manner fascinated, by the singular metamorphose wrought by a smile, two lines of an unpublished poem, written by a dear dead friend, rose unbidden to his lips. He repeated them, half unconsciously, below his breath: