Then, at last, it was all over. The orchestra had ceased. And they were once more behind the jasmine pillars, quite bereft of sense of other being than that which had been among the violins.
The touch of the feather of his chapeau on her cheek was enough. She lifted up her face to him. And when he had raised the mask, there was a look such as he had never seen even in his dreams of the fairest woman in the world. Damp tendrils of her hair flowed over her cheeks. Within its calyx of a lily was indeed the rose. And there it blushed and pulsed with the newest and the oldest emotions that have ever stirred a woman’s soul. Her lips begged kisses, hungry, insensible, mad, and were not denied.
But then she shuddered at her deed.
“Take me home!” she cried. “I am an outcast!”
“Yes,” whispered Bell-Bell’s voice behind him, “take her home—you brute!”
In the carriage she shuddered away from him.
“No!” she cried. “I am a monster! And you have let me be one!”
But when he had brought her in and was dejectedly taking his leave, the sudden passion came again as it had come that moment when he kissed her.
“Bell-Bell,” she whispered with large eyes and feverish lips, “ought I to see him—to the door? Just one instant, perhaps? I did not thank him, I was unkind to him. In the carriage I thought I hated him. He ought to have known better. He is of the world and knows. I did not. At the ball he said—he called me his—he—”
She whispered something in her very ear as if to keep the horrid knowledge from her own soul.