“Oh! beautiful—singular—and yet ominous name!” exclaimed the young gentleman. “Yes—you are my friend—my dear friend Perdita! And now, Perdita, I will avail myself of this romantic yet not the less sincere friendship that is established between us, to ask you what caprice or fancy gave you so remarkable a Christian name?”
“Because in my infancy—shortly after my birth, and before I was baptised—I was lost,—or rather stolen by gipsies,” answered Perdita, investing herself and her history with as much of the charm of mysticism as possible: “and when I was recovered from the kidnappers by my parents, they christened me Perdita—or The Lost One.”
“Every thing connected with you seems to be imbued with deep and enthralling interest, my dear friend,” said Charles: “a supernatural halo appears to surround you! Your beauty is of a nature so superior to aught of female loveliness that I ever before beheld—your voice has something so indescribably melting and musical that it awakens echoes in the inmost recesses of the soul—your history is strange, wild, and impressive in its very commencement—your disposition is characterised by a frankness and candour so generous that it inspires and reciprocates profound friendship the instant it meets a kindred spirit—and then there is about you a something so witching, so captivating, so enchanting, that the best and most virtuous of men would lose all sense of duty, did you—sweet syren that you are—undertake to lead them astray.”
“If I have indeed found a kindred spirit in you, Charles,” said Perdita, taking his hand and pressing it as if in grateful and innocent rapture to her heaving bosom—an act which only tended to inflame the young man almost to madness,—“I shall have gained that which I have long sought, and never yet found. For my heart has hitherto been as complete a stranger to a sincere friendship as to love! When I spoke ere now of our friends in the country, I meant those acquaintances whom custom denominates by the other title.”
“Perdita—my friend Perdita, the amity that we have pledged each other shall be eternal!” exclaimed Charles, in an impassioned tone.
“And you will return to visit me to-morrow?” said the young woman, her fine grey eyes beaming with an unsettled lustre, as if the mingled voluptuousness of day and night met in those splendid, eloquent orbs.
“Yes—oh! yes!” cried Charles, as if it were unnecessary to have asked the question. “And now I shall leave you, Perdita: I shall depart to feast my imagination on the pleasures of this interview.”
Thus speaking, the young man pressed Perdita’s hand to his lips, and hurried from the room, intoxicated with a delirium of bliss, and scarcely conscious of where he was or whither he was going.
CHAPTER CXXXI.
THE SYREN’S ARTS AND CHARMS.
On gaining the street, Charles Hatfield hurried along like one demented,—positively reeling with the influence which Perdita’s charms, allurements, and arts had shed upon him,—and feeling within his soul a glow of such ineffable happiness that he appeared to have been snatched from the world and wafted to Elysium. Had he just quitted a banquet where his head had been pillowed on the bosom of beauty, and the fair hands of the charmer had held to his lips brimming goblets of champagne of which he had drunk deeply, he would not have experienced a more extraordinary degree of excitement, nor such felicitous sensations.