No scruples restrained her from giving herself up heart and soul to thoughts of him. He was her husband, and she had a right to love him, to glow with delight at the memory of his caresses, and to long ardently for the moment when she should see him again. In a very few days she would be doubly married to him—for Laline was resolved that the blessing of the Church should cement that hurried and unimpressive civil ceremony at Boulogne.
It occurred to her more than once that Wallace, in his impatience to claim her as his wife, might wish, when once he learned her identity, to dispense with the delay of a second wedding; and for this reason alone she debated whether it might not be better to defer telling him the truth until after the ceremony had been performed.
Yet again she told herself that before the altar she must speak the truth. Laline Armstrong and not Lina Grahame was her name, and as Laline Armstrong she must be married—Laline Armstrong, neither spinster, widow, nor wife. The definitions confused her, and she laughed aloud in the dark from sheer light-heartedness to think that a man should be unknowingly wooing and wedding his own wife.
She would never feel that she was really his wife until they had been married in a church. So utterly different was the man she now knew and loved from the reckless, defiant, capriciously kind Wallace Armstrong of the old Boulogne days, that it seemed as though another soul had entered into the man, and that another ceremony was necessary to make him truly her husband.
The marked dislike, amounting almost to abhorrence, with which he alluded to his past experiences was characteristic of his complete reformation; but it was just this quality which made Laline dread breaking the truth to him. At least for a few days she decided that she must still be Lina Grahame. Their relations were so perfect that the introduction of any new element might mar their complete harmony; and having once arrived at this determination, Laline let her brain slip back again to the congenial employment of living again through every incident of her second courtship until at length her waking dreams of passionate delight were merged in sleep.
At this precise moment all happiness fled. No sooner was she asleep than terrible dreams afflicted her soul—dreams in which she was always endeavouring to reach her lover until some terrible catastrophe occurred to prevent their union, and she was hurled away into space with the sound of a man's mocking laughter in her ears.
Sometimes she thought she was wandering in a flower-bedecked meadow under a cloudless sky while numberless birds sang sweetly overhead. At a little distance she perceived Wallace approaching her, with gladness in his eyes and arms outstretched to embrace her. Through all her joy at sight of him a sense of foreboding hung over her which was too soon justified; for as, advancing rapidly to her side, he had almost seized her hands in his, the solid earth cleft open beneath their feet and they were irrevocably parted.
"You are mine—mine!" another voice seemed to mutter in her ear. Invisible hands imprisoned her, holding her back whenever she strove through the long hours of hideous dreaming to reach her lover; and, when at length the morning dawned and she awoke, it was with a terrible sense of impending trouble weighing upon her mind.
Just such a night of horrors had she experienced on a previous occasion not many days before. The night preceding Wallace Armstrong's appearance at Mrs. Vandeleur's house had been marked by exactly similar dreams; and Laline, as she dressed and contemplated her pale face and startled eyes in the looking-glass, tried to reassure herself by recalling that no untoward event had followed her dreams on the former occasion.