CHAPTER VIII
Antony waited in the drawing-room of her hotel in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne some quarter of an hour before she came downstairs. He thought later that she had purposely given him this time to look about and grow accustomed to the atmosphere, to the room in which he afterward more or less lived for several months.
There was not a false note to disturb his beauty-loving sense. He stood waiting, on one side a long window giving on a rose garden, as he afterward discovered, on the other a group in marble by Cedersholm. He was studying this with interest when he heard Mrs. Faversham enter the room. She had foreseen that he would not be likely to wear an evening dress and she herself had put on the simplest of her frocks. But he thought her quite dazzling, and the grace of her hands, and her welcome as she greeted him, were divine to the young man.
"I'm so glad to see you, Mr. Rainsford."
Instantly he bent and kissed her hand. She saw him flush to his fair hair. He felt a gratitude to her, a thankfulness, which awakened in him immediately the strongest of emotions.
She seemed to consider him a distinguished guest. She told him that she was going to Rome when Mr. Cedersholm came over—there would be a little party going down to Italy.
Fairfax's eyes kindled, and in the few moments he stood with her there, in her fragrant drawing-room, where the fire in the logs sang and whispered and the lamp-light threw its long, fair shadows on the crimson floors and melted in the crimson hangings, he felt that he stood with an old friend, with some one he had known his life long and known well, even before he had known—and
there was a poignancy in his treason—even before he had known his mother.