She started back and looked round with a guilty terror, as if she dared not think out the half-spoken surmise even to herself.
“He knows nothing—he can know nothing; and he has no longer any hold on me,” she muttered presently; “unless—unless the other has told him; and I don’t believe he would trust a fellow like him: for Paul Desfrayne is as proud as Lucifer. Oh, if I could but live my life over again! What mistakes—what fatal mistakes I have made—mistakes which may yet bring ruin as their fruit! I will leave England to-morrow. I don’t care what they say, or think, or what loss it may cost to myself or any one else. Yet, am I safer elsewhere? I know not. What would be the consequences if they could prove I had done what I have done? I know not; I have never had the courage to ask.”
Totally unconscious of the vicinity of this beautiful, vindictive woman, Captain Desfrayne tranquilly passed into the house which he had come to visit.
“Can I see Mrs. Desfrayne?” he inquired of the smart maid servant who answered his summons.
“I will see, sir. She was at dinner, sir, and I don’t think she has gone out yet.”
The beribboned and pretty girl, throwing open the door of a room at hand, and ushering the visitor within, left him alone, while she flitted off in search of the lady for whom he had asked, not, however, without taking a sidelong glance at his handsome face before she disappeared.
The apartment was a long dining-room, extending from the front to the back of the house, furnished amply, yet with a certain richness, the articles being all of old oak, carved elaborately, which lent a somber, somewhat stately effect. It was obviously, however, a room in a semifashionable boarding-house.
In a few minutes a lady opened the door, and entered with the joyous eagerness of a girl.
A graceful, dignified woman, in reality seventeen years older than Captain Desfrayne, but who looked hardly five years his senior, of the purest type of English matronly beauty. She seemed like one of Reynolds’ or Gainsborough’s most exquisite portraits warmed into life, just alighted from its canvas. The soft, blond hair, the clear, roselike complexion, the large, half-melting violet eyes, the smiling mouth, with its dimples playing at hide-and-seek, the perfectly chiseled nose, the dainty, rounded chin, the patrician figure, so classically molded that it drew away attention from the fact that every little detail of the apparently little-studied yet careful toilet was finished to the most refined nicety—these hastily noted points could scarce give any conception of the almost dazzling loveliness of Paul Desfrayne’s widowed mother.
She entered with a light, quick step, and being met almost as she crossed the threshold by her visitor, she raised her white hands, sparkling with rings, and drew down his head with an ineffably tender and loving touch.