"No, my dear," she replied gently, pressing his arm. "I am quite satisfied with my one conquest. It is all I desire in the world."
They were leaning against the taffrail, listening to the gurgling of the waters in the luminous wake and watching the black lines of the masts waving against the starlit sky.
"You are silent," she observed. "Why are you so sad?"
"I am thinking of my wife," he replied, almost sullenly.
"Poor Lillie! I wish she were here," said Mrs. Larue.
"My God! what a woman you are!" exclaimed the Colonel. "Don't you know that I should be ashamed to look her in the face?"
"My dear, why do you distress yourself so? You can love her still. I am not exacting. I only want a corner in your heart. If I might, I would demand the whole; but I know I could not have it. You ought not to be unhappy; that is my part in the drama. I have sacrificed much. What have you sacrificed? A man risks nothing, loses nothing, in these affairs du cœur. He has a bonne fortune, voilà tout."
Carter was heavy laden in secret with his bonne fortune. He was glad when the voyage ended, and he could leave Mrs. Larue at New York, with a pleasing chance that he might never meet her again, and a hope that he had heard the last of her sainte passion de l'amour. Of course he was obliged, before he quitted her, to see that she was established in a good boarding house, and to introduce her to one or two respectable families among his old acquaintance in the city. Of course also he said nothing to these families about her propensities towards the divin sens and the sainte passion. She quickly made herself a character as a southern loyalist, and as such became quite a pet in society. Before she had been a week in the city she was an inmate of the household of the Rev. Dr. Whitehead, a noted theologian and leading abolitionist, who worked untiringly at the seemingly easy task of converting her from the errors of slavery and papacy. It somewhat scandalized his graver parishioners, especially those of Copperhead tendencies, that he should patronize so gay a lady. But the Reverend Doctor did not see her pranks, and did not believe the tale when others related them. How could he when she looked the picture of a saint, dressed entirely in black and white, wore her hair plain a la Madonne, and talked theology with those earnest eyes, and that childlike smile? To the last he honestly regarded her as very nigh unto the kingdom of heaven. It was to shield her from envious slanders, to cover her with the ægis of his great and venerable name, that the warm-hearted, unsuspicious old gentleman dedicated to her his little work on moral reform, entitled "St. Mary Magdalen." How ecstatically Mrs. Larue laughed over this book when she got to her own room with it, after the presentation! She had not had such a paroxysm of merriment before, since she was a child; for during all her adult life she had been too blasee to laugh often with profound heartiness and honesty: her gayety had been superficial, like most of her other expressions of feeling. I can imagine that she looked very attractive in her spasm of jollity, with her black eyes sparkling, her brunette cheeks flushed, her jetty streams of hair waving and her darkly roseate arms and shoulders bare in the process of undressing. Before she went to bed she put the book in an envelope addressed to Carter, and wrote a playful letter to accompany it, signed "Your best and most loving friend, St. Marie Madeleine."