“Pray, how long since you took to visiting Silverton so frequently—becoming so familiar as to spend the night?”
There was no mistaking the jealousy which betrayed itself in every tone of Juno’s voice as she stood before Mark, a fit picture of the enraged goddess whose name she bore. Soon recollecting herself, however, she changed her mode of attack, and said, laughingly,
“Seriously, though, this Miss Lennox seems a very nice girl, and is admirably fitted, I think, for the position she is to fill—that of a country physician’s wife,” and in the black eyes there was a wicked sparkle as Juno saw that her meaning was readily understood, Mark looking quickly at her, and asking if she referred to Dr. Grant.
“Certainly; I imagine that was settled as long ago as we met him in Paris. Once I thought it might have been our Katy, but was mistaken. I think the doctor and Miss Lennox well adapted to each other.”
There was for a moment a dull, heavy pain at Mark’s heart, caused by that little item of information which made him so uncomfortable. On the whole he did not doubt it, for everything he could recall of Morris had a tendency to strengthen the belief. Nothing could be more probable, thrown together as they had been, without other congenial society, and nothing could be more suitable.
“They are well matched,” Mark thought, as he walked listlessly through Mrs. Reynolds’s parlors, seeing only one face, and that the face of Helen Lennox, with the lily in her hair, just as it looked when she tied the apron about his neck and laughed at his appearance.
Helen was not the ideal which in his boyhood Mark had cherished of the one who was to be his wife, for that was of a woman more like Juno, with whom he had always been on the best of terms, giving her some reason for believing herself the favored one; but ideals change as years go on, and Helen Lennox had more attractions for him now than the most dashing belle of his acquaintance.
“I do not believe I am in love with her,” he said to himself when, after his return from Mrs. Reynolds’s he sat for a long time before the fire in his dressing-room, cogitating upon what he had heard, and wondering why it should affect him so much. “Of course I am not,” he continued, feeling the necessity of reiterating the assertion by way of making himself believe it. “She is not at all what I used to imagine the future Mrs. Mark Ray to be. Half my friends would say she had no style, no beauty, and perhaps she has not. Certainly she does not look just like the ladies at Mrs. Reynolds’s to-night, but give her the same advantages and she would surpass them all.”
And then Mark Ray went off into a reverie, in which he saw Helen Lennox his wife, and with the aids by which he would surround her, rapidly developing into as splendid a woman as little Katy Cameron, who did not need to be developed, but took all hearts at once by that natural, witching grace so much a part of herself. It was a very pleasant picture which Mark painted upon the mental canvas; but there came a great blur blotting out its brightness as he remembered Dr. Grant.
“But it shall not interfere with my being just as kind to her as before. She will need some attendant here, and Wilford will be glad to shove her off his hands. He is so infernal proud,” Mark said, and taking a fresh cigar he finished his reverie with the magnanimous resolve that were Helen a hundred times engaged she should be his especial care during her sojourn in New York.