He did not sit as she had asked him to do, but stood looking down at her and thinking—thinking alas!—that she never had been quite so beautiful. She was almost as white as her gown, the powder still clung to her hair, which, in the dim light of the candles, chose to hide the glory of its ardent colour beneath the filmy artificial veil. She wore some exquisite pearls, his gift on the day of her marriage: row upon row of these exquisite gems fell on her throat and bosom, both as white, as glittering and pure as the priceless treasures from the deep.
The chair in which she sat was covered with damask of a rich dull gold, and against this background with its bright lights and impenetrably dark shadows, the white figure stood out like what he had always pictured her, a cold and unapproachable statue.
But to-night, though so still and white, the delicate marble had taken unto itself life: the life which means sorrow. All the haughtiness of the look had vanished; there were deep shadows under the eyes and lines of suffering round the perfectly chiselled lips.
Henry Dewhyrst, Marquis of Eglinton, was not yet thirty: he loved this exquisitely beautiful woman with all his heart and soul, and she had never been anything more to him than a perfectly carved image would be on the high altar of a cathedral. She had been neither helpmate nor wife, only an ideal, an intangible shadow which his love had not succeeded in materializing.
As he looked at her now, he wondered for the first time in the course of their married life, if it had been his own fault that they had remained such complete strangers: this was because for the first time to-day a great sorrow, a still greater shame had breathed life into the marble-like statue.
All at once he felt deeply, unutterably sorry for her; he had no thought of her wrongs toward him, only of those done to herself by her pride and the faults of the epoch in which she lived.
"Milor," she said trying to steady her voice, "it would ease me a little—and ease the painfulness of this interview—if you were to tell me at what precise moment you entered Her Majesty's throne-room to-night."
"I cannot say, Madame," he replied with the ghost of a smile; "I did not look at the clock, but I was in attendance on His Majesty and therefore . . ."
"You heard what passed between Madame la Comtesse de Stainville and myself?" she interrupted hastily.
"Every word."