Now, Lavinia was in all the splendor of that second beauty which comes to women who have not received incurable wounds in the heart in their first youth. She was still a pale, thin Portuguese, with a slightly bronzed skin and a somewhat sharp profile; but her expression and her manners had acquired all the grace, all the caressing charm, of a Frenchwoman's. Her dark skin was as soft as velvet, as the result of restored and unfailing health; her slender form had recovered the lithe and flexible activity of youth; her hair, which she had cut off in the old days as a sacrifice to love, now shone in all its splendor, in heavy masses over her smooth brow; her costume consisted of a gown of India muslin, and a bunch of white heather, picked in the ravine and thrust in her hair. There is no more graceful plant than the white heather; as you watched its delicate clusters waving over Lavinia's black hair, you would have said that they were clusters of living pearls. That head-dress and that simple gown were in the most exquisite taste, and the ingenious coquetry of the sex revealed itself therein by dint of concealing itself.
Never had Lionel seen Lavinia so fascinating. For an instant, he was on the point of falling at her feet and asking pardon; but the placid smile that he saw on her face restored to him the modicum of bitterness necessary to enable him to carry through the interview with every appearance of dignity.
In default of suitable words, he took from his breast a carefully sealed package, and said, in a firm voice, as he placed it on the table:
"You see, madame, that I have obeyed like a slave; may I believe that my liberty will be restored to me from to-day?"
"It seems to me," rejoined Lavinia, with a somewhat melancholy playfulness, "that your liberty has not been very tightly chained, Sir Lionel! As a matter of fact, have you remained all this time in my fetters? I confess that I had not flattered myself that such was the fact."
"Oh! madame, in heaven's name, let us not jest! Is not this a melancholy moment?"
"It is an old tradition," she replied, "a conventional dénouement, an inevitable climax in all love-stories. And if, when two people were writing to each other, they were thoroughly impressed with the fact that in the future they would have to wrest their letters from each other with suspicion—— But no one ever thinks of it. At twenty years, we write with a sense of the utmost security, because we have exchanged eternal oaths; we smile with pity when we think of the commonplace results of all the passions that we see dying out; we are proud to believe that we shall prove an exception to this great law of human fickleness! Noble error, blessed conceit, wherein are born the grandeur and the illusions of youth! isn't that so, Lionel?"
Lionel remained dumb with stupefaction. This sadly philosophical language, although natural enough in Lavinia's mouth, seemed to him a ghastly contradiction, for he had never seen her so: he had seen her, a weak child, abandon herself blindly to all the errors of life, yield herself trustfully to all the tempests of passion; and, when he had left her crushed with grief, he had heard her continue to protest eternal fidelity to the author of her despair.
But to hear her thus pronounce sentence of death on all the illusions of the past, was a painful and ghastly thing. That woman who survived herself, so to speak, and who was not afraid to deliver a funeral oration on her own life, was a profoundly depressing spectacle, which Lionel could not witness without a pang. He could think of nothing to say in reply. He knew better than any one all that might be said in such cases, but he had not the courage to help Lavinia to commit suicide.
As he twisted and turned the package of letters in his hand in his embarrassment, she continued: