And Doris had looked up at her with the quiet smile, beneath which always lay an undercurrent of sadness, and shook her head, as she replied:
“The danger is all on your side, Lady Despard. You are the sun, I am merely the shadow. Some day some one will pluck the sun from its place, and the shadow will be desolate!”
But Lady Despard had laughed placidly.
“No, thank you, dear! I’ve been married once, and, as the boy said of the prickly pear, ‘No more for me, thank you!’ But yours is another case altogether, and I confess that I tremble every day lest you should come and tell me, with that mouselike little smile of yours, that one of these men is going to take you from me! Ah! what a pity it would be!—for we are so happy, you and I, dear! If girls could only know when they are well off! But they never do. It’s only when they have resigned their liberty and given all their heart for about a quarter of some selfish man’s that they discover what a fraud matrimony is!”
And Doris had made no reply beyond the quiet, “mouselike smile,” and a little sigh, which was too low to reach her companion’s ear.
Not Lady Despard alone, but many another of the frequenters of the Villa Rimini, have wondered that this beautiful English girl should be so irresponsive to the admiration and attentions lavished upon her. Men of rank and position, for whom the matrons of society angled unceasingly, paid court to her, needing but a smile or word of encouragement to lay their titles at her feet; but the smile nor the word were never extended to them. As the Princess of Carthage, clad in the mystic veil, moved, like an unapproachable spirit, among the suitors at her father’s court, so Doris Marlowe lived, surrounded by a barrier of reserve which, vague and intangible as it was, served to keep the most ardent at arm’s length.
The past alone was to her reality; the present seemed like a dream; and often she sat beside Lady Despard, surrounded by a crowd of people laughing and talking, the voices died upon her ears, and she heard only the murmur of the brook in Barton meadows, mingling with the voice of the man who had won her heart and tossed it aside, shattered and broken forever.
Often she wondered whether he had married the Lady Grace—whose name, when first she had heard it on his lips, had sounded like a knell in her ears.
If stone walls do not a prison make, a crowd cannot destroy solitude, and Doris, in the midst of the brilliant throng which made the Villa Rimini its center, lived in a mental and spiritual solitude, on the threshold of which only two persons ever trod. One was Lady Despard, whom she loved, the other was—Percy Levant. She would have treated him as coldly as she did all the others, but it was impossible. He made it impossible by never giving her a chance of repulsing him. Since the evening he had come to Chester Gardens for the first time he had never paid her a single compliment, and from his lips alone she never received a single “pretty” speech.
Although he slept at the inn, he had a luxurious suite of apartments in the villa, and they met at almost every meal, and frequently during the day, but his manner to Doris was one of studious courtesy toned by a reserve which matched her own.