She loosened her hands,—he tried to hold them, but they seemed to melt from his clasp in the most curious and uncanny way like melting snow. Drawing herself apart, she stood looking at him.
“Come back to you!” she echoed—“I never left you! It was you who left me!—for no fault! And, now I suppose you would leave your wife,—also for no fault—except perhaps—” and she laughed lightly—“that of too much general weightiness! But she has given you children—are you not proud and happy to be ‘the father of a family’? Your daughters are certainly very plain,—but you must not go by outward appearances!”
Her lovely face dimpled with smiles—her brilliant eyes, full of a compelling magnetism, filled him with a kind of inward rage—he gave a gesture of mingled wrath and pain.
“You are quite unlike the old Diana,” he said, bitterly. “She was the gentlest of creatures,—she would never have mocked me!”
A rippling peal of laughter broke from her—laughter that was so cold and cutting that its very vibration on the air was like the tinkling of ice-drops on glass.
“True!” she said. “She was too gentle by half! She was meek and patient—devoted, submissive and loving—she believed in a man’s truth, honour and chivalry! Yes—the poor ‘old’ Diana had feeling and emotions—but the ‘young’ Diana has none!”
The afternoon sunshine pouring through the window bathed her figure in a luminance so dazzling and made of her such a radiant vision of exquisite perfection that he was fairly dazzled, while the same uneasy sense of the “supernatural” troubled him as it had troubled Mr. James Polydore May.
“Well, if you will talk like this,” he said, almost reproachfully—“I had better not trouble you with my company—you said you wanted me——”
“So I do!” she rejoined—“I want you very much!—but not just now! You can go—but come again soon! However I need not ask you—you are sure to come! And you need not tell your wife to call upon me—I will dispense with that formality! I prefer to ignore your ‘family!’ Au revoir!”
She stretched out her hand—a little, lovely hand like that of the marble Psyche—and hardly knowing what he did, he covered it with kisses. She smiled.