At dinner Mr. Linmere arrived. Margie met him with cold composure. He scanned her fair face and almost faultless form, with the eye of a connoisseur, and congratulated himself on the fortune which was to give him, such a bride without the perplexity of a wooing. She was beautiful and attractive, and he had feared she might be ugly, which would have been a dampener on his satisfaction. True, her wealth would have counter-balanced any degree of personal deformity; but Mr. Paul Linmere admired beauty, and liked to have pretty things around him.
To tell the truth, he was sadly in need of money. It was fortunate that his old friend, Mr. Harrison, Margie's dead father, had taken it into his head to plight his daughter's troth to him while she was yet a child. Mr. Harrison had been an eccentric man; and from the fact that in many points of religious belief he and Mr. Paul Linmere agreed, (for both were miserable skeptics,) he valued him above all other men, and thought his daughter's happiness would be secured by the union he had planned.
Linmere had been abroad several years, and had led a very reckless, dissipated life. Luxurious by nature, lacking in moral rectitude, and having wealth at his command, he indulged himself unrestrained; and when at last he left the gay French capital and returned to America, his whole fortune, with exception of a few thousands, was dissipated. So he needed a rich wife sorely, and was not disposed to defer his happiness.
He met Margie with empressement, and bowed his tall head to kiss the white hand she extended to him. She drew it away coldly—something about the man made her shrink from him.
"I am so happy to meet you again. Margie, and after ten years of separation! I have thought so much and so often of you."
"Thank you, Mr. Linmere."
"Will you not call me Paul?" he asked, in a subdued voice, letting his dangerous eyes, full of light and softness, rest on her.
An expression of haughty surprise swept her face. She drew back a pace.
"I am not accustomed to address gentlemen—mere acquaintances—by their Christian names, sir."
"But in this case, Margie? Surely the relations existing between us will admit of such a familiarity," he said, seating himself, while she remained standing coldly near.