She followed the direction of the wife's scornful eyes.
The folding doors were open, and through the archway, they had a view of the mother, tempting her boy with a flower she had taken from a bouquet, near by, laughing at his open mouth, starting eyes, and fluttering arms, as he tried to seize it. Orrin had approached her while his wife was speaking to Eunice; accosted her before she was aware of his vicinity. His remark, delivered with his most insinuating smile, and in his inimitable manner, was evidently a compliment to the beauty of the child; but she met it with lightness bordering upon contempt. Dropping the flower, she lifted the babe from his temporary throne on the stuffed back of an easy chair, and walked away.
Mrs. Wyllys tittered shrilly, and clapped her hands.
"A decided rebuff!" she sneered, more loudly than good breeding would have counselled. "It is strange, Miss Kirke, that your lady-killer is so slow to learn the mortifying fact that he ceases to be irresistible when he has been guilty of the mistake of matrimony."
Orrin, nervously sensitive to her tones, heard and saw her, while he affected to do neither; saw, likewise, by whom she was standing, and that she showed beside her neighbor as a tawdry, artificial rose, faded and tumbled, does when near a stately, living lily.
Seeing and admitting all this, he heaved an inaudible sigh that did not touch his eyes or chasten his careless smile. His inward moan was not—"Me miserable!" or "Fool that I was!" or anything else poetical or tragic; but—"If I could have afforded it!"
"The fair Euna will wear better than mia cara sposa!" he owned, candidly. "But money outlasts beauty, and is more necessary to a man's happiness. Love is only a luxury; an indulgence too costly for the enjoyment of most wedded pairs. Beryl eyes and a Greek profile would not have paid my debts, nor the future claims of carriage makers, and horse-jockeys, and yacht-builders, No! I have done all that man could, in the like circumstances. Better bread buttered on both sides by Hester, than a dry slice with Eunice."
He owed Miss Kirke no grudge; found placid satisfaction in reviewing their intercourse, akin to that he experienced in the contemplation of a fine, mezzo-tinto engraving or a moonlit landscape. But Jessie irritated and piqued him. If her gay insensibility were bravado, he would yet make her drop the mask. His wife was right in affirming that the passion for conquest was not extinct after a year of married bliss.
"She did worship me in those days!" he ruminated. "Worshipped me madly and entirely, as men are seldom loved, as few women are capable of loving. Does she take me for an idiot in supposing that I credit the thoroughness of her cure!"
Lounging in a desultory way through the rooms, bowing to this, and exchanging a pleasant word with that one of the friends collected to do honor to the infant scion of the house, he contrived to waylay Jessie in the hall. She had transferred the baby to the nurse's care, and was returning to her guests. A fierce impulse possessed him as he marked her happy face, flushed by excitement into loveliness that had never been hers in her girlhood. She was passing him with a slight and nonchalant bow, when he arrested her.