“Now, little wife, tell me,” he whispered, looking down into her eyes with the steady fire of a man’s noblest, strongest love, before which a woman’s weak fears and suspicions could not but melt and wither, “do you believe I want to make your life unhappy? Do you think I shall be hard and cruel to you, and deprive you of anything that can please you? Look up, look up, and tell me if you think so!”
She looked up, transformed by the love-touch, the love-speech, into a little spirit of fire and light, burning into his heart and flesh with an irresistible, intoxicating strength of feverish, though fitful passion. As her lips pressed his, as her fingers glided with slow, voluptuous touch till they ruffled his curly hair and clasped each other behind his head, he forgot his intention, forgot his suspicious fears, enthralled by the bliss of possession of the first woman he had ever loved and longed for. It was not until the passion-fire began to fade in Nouna’s eyes, and she slid languidly down from his neck, and drawing his arms about her so as to support her best in the position she chose, nestled against him with closing eyes, while a long sigh of perfect and complete happiness rose to her parted lips, seemed to quiver along her form, and then died slowly away, that his doubts and fears surged up again in the midst of his own intoxication of pleasure, and, with difficulty steadying himself to the task, he framed a form of words in which to resume his interrogatory.
“Listen, Nouna,” he said, with an inevitable touch of hardness in his effort at self-control; “I want you to tell me all that happened after you drove off with Mr. Angelo from the church-door to-day.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed in a long wail of weary disgust at the obtrusive inquiry, “you don’t want to worry me about that now, do you? I’ll tell you all about it some other time.”
And she flung her arms back over her head, and laughed up at him through the ivory frame in lazy witchery. Finding, however, that he remained firm and would not look down at her, she changed her attitude, and, by a quick, lithe movement, twined herself coaxingly about him. George gave scarcely a sign of the fierce conflict that was going on within him, between the despotic, wickedly used power this little creature was trying to establish over him, and his own manful determination to assume without delay his rightful lordship. For this once he had the mastery, keeping lip and limb under firm control, and disentangling himself from her arms to hold her away from him, he looked steadily, but with a most loving reserve of tenderness in his eyes, into her half-petulant, half-reproachful face.
“Tell me now, darling, and then we’ll kiss all thoughts of it away.”
Whereat she made a spring at him to anticipate the reward. But seeing that, instead of lighting up with the flame she wanted to see in them again, his eyes retained the steady, searching look, which moreover seemed to become more grimly resolute for her evasions, she turned to tearfulness, and without actually crying, moaned out in a most melancholy voice, and with a woman’s natural love of piling on the agony, that he had better kill her, since it was plain he did not love her.
“Come, darling, you know better than that,” said he gently. “But I am your husband, and you must tell me what I wish to know.”
It may be easily imagined that he was becoming madly anxious and suspicious under all these evasions, which seemed to denote that she had something to hide more serious than he supposed. Finding all her artifices useless, and failing in an angry struggle to escape from his arms, she proceeded to unfasten all her bracelets, to tear out her diamond lizard, and after piling them in a heap in her lap, to toss them all with a sudden, violent jerk on to the floor at her husband’s feet.
“There!” said she triumphantly, “will that satisfy you?”