When Sybil Berners found herself for a moment alone with her husband, she laid her hand upon his coat sleeve to stay him, in his haste, and she inquired:
“What do you think of her now?”
“I think, my darling Sybil, that you were right in your judgment of this lady. And I agree with you perfectly. I think, my only love, that in what you have done for this stranger, you have acted not only with the goodness, but with the wisdom of an angel,” replied Lyon Berners, snatching her suddenly to his heart, and holding her closely there while he pressed kiss after kiss upon her crimson lip; and murmured:
“I must steal a kiss from these sweet lips when and wherever I can, my own one, since we are not to be much alone together now.”
And then he released her, and hurried off to put on his overcoat.
Sybil stood for a minute, smiling, where he had left her, and so happy that she forgot she had to get ready to go. The pain was gone from her heart, and the cloud from her brain.
And as yet, so little did she know of herself or others, that she could not have told why the pain and the cloud ever came, or why they ever went away.
As yet she did not know that her husband’s admiring smiles given to a rival beauty had really caused her nameless suffering; or that it was his loving caresses, bestowed upon herself, that had soothed it.
In a word, Sybil Berners, the young bride, did not dream that the bitter, bitter seed of jealousy was germinating in her heart, to grow and spread perhaps into a deadly upas of the soul, destroying all moral life around it.