He turned round. She was holding out her arms. George gave a great cry.
“Nouna, my wife, my wife!”
The next moment she was crushed up against his breast.
When out of the intoxication of that first embrace George drifted slowly back to a dim consciousness of earthly things, it came upon him with a sudden sobering shock that there was something new and unaccounted for in the appearance of his bride. For on the little slender arm that encircled his neck with the clinging, vibrating pressure of an absorbing passion, shone and glittered close under his eyes a sparkling mass of precious stones. He drew away from her suddenly, and seizing both her arms almost roughly, pushed up the half transparent sleeves and looked from the one to the other in stupefaction, while Nouna laughed aloud in exuberant, luxurious happiness.
“Where did you get these?” he asked in bewilderment even stronger than his anxiety.
George had but a scant and careless acquaintance with the contents of jewellers’ windows, and his circle of diamond-bedecked duchesses was less than limited. But there was a quiet self-sufficiency about the way in which those white transparent stones allowed themselves to be looked upon as unobtrusive modest things, and then, at a turn of Nouna’s wrist, flashed dazzling rays into his eyes, which told him that these pretty ornaments were not like the innocent and harmless mock jewels in the silver-gilt bracelets that Nouna had been allowed to deck herself out with in Mary Street, but were that bane of the husband—diamonds. What the value of the jewels she was wearing might be he did not even guess; but he could not doubt that the seven bracelets she had on her arms, and a glittering diamond lizard three inches long, with rubies for eyes, which fastened her sash where that morning there had been only a simple pin, and a necklace of large pearls that encircled her throat, had cost more than four or five years of his pay. He looked at them with a very grave and doubtful face, with as much mistrust and misliking as if they had been poisonous insects.
“Ha, ha!” cried Nouna, raising her arms and turning them about that the jewels might flash and sparkle the more in the rays of the afternoon sun struggling through the blinds. “Where did I get them? You must guess that.”
She was for the moment too much absorbed in the delight of watching the changing lights on her trinkets to notice the discontent in his face. Glancing then merrily at him to direct his attention to the play of the sunlight upon the stones, she let her arms fall as she noted his expression.
“Don’t you like to see me wear pretty things?” she asked plaintively; then, as he did not at once answer, she turned petulantly away from him, and threw herself face downwards full-length upon the couch. “It is true what Rahas says,” she cried passionately, “that an Englishman likes jewels on every woman but his wife, that he would rather she should appear ugly in his own eyes than pretty in anybody else’s, that he calls her a goddess to reconcile her to leading the—the—life of a do—og!”
All this she poured out parrot-like amid sobs and floods of tears, while George remained on his knees beside her, and listened as quietly as a statue. Like other open and generous natures with an element of strength in them, he could be as merciful towards the frank confession of weakness as he was hard in the face of deception. He thought Rahas had worked on her by means of her love of finery, and by dark warnings against the husband of whom she had as yet had no experience, and stifling all impulses of rage against the author of the evil, who was absent and could not now be dealt with, he at once set about arriving at a more complete knowledge of what had taken place between his young wife and the wily Oriental. Sitting on the edge of the couch he put his arms round Nouna, drew her to him, and calmed her outburst of tearful petulance with tender, yearning caresses, so fond, so warm, with such depths of almost paternal protectiveness toning down and mingling with the ardent passion of the lover, that her fitful nature was soothed in a very few moments, and her arms made instinctively for his neck again as a baby turns to its mother’s breast, and the tears dried on her cheeks as she began to smile up confidingly into his face.