"You flatter me, Colonel Carlyle," she said lightly, but in her heart she knew that he had spoken truly. She had been afloat on the whirling tide of fashionable life now for several months, and praises and adulation had followed her everywhere. The gay Parisians went mad over her pure blonde loveliness. They said she was the most beautiful and refined woman in Paris, as well as the most cold and pure. She had begun to take a certain pleasure in the gaieties of the world and in the homage that followed her wherever she moved. These were the empty husks on which she had to feed her heart's hunger, and she was trying to find them sweet.
Colonel Carlyle's baleful jealousy had lain dormant or concealed even since he had taken his wife from school.
True, his arch-enemy, Felise Herbert, was in Paris, but for some reason of her own she had not as yet laid any serious pitfall for his unwary feet.
Perhaps she was only playing with him as the cat does with the little mouse before she ruthlessly murders it; perhaps Bonnibel's icy-cold manner and studied reserve to all made it harder to excite the old soldier's ever ready suspicion.
Be that as it may, life flowed on calmly if not happily to the colonel and his young wife.
They met Mrs. Arnold and her daughter frequently in their fashionable rounds, they invited them to their house, and received invitations in return, but though the colonel was cordial, his wife was cold and proud to the two women who had been so cruel to her and driven her into this unhappy marriage with a man old enough to be her grandfather. She could not forgive them for that cruel deed.
"I bide my time," Felise said to her mother one day when they were discussing the Carlyles. "I am giving her a little taste of the world's pleasures. I want her to fall in love with this life she is leading here. She will be tempted by its enticements and forget her coldness and prudishness. Then I shall strike."
"She is very circumspect," said Mrs. Arnold. "They say she is a model of virtue and beautiful wifely obedience."
"The higher she soars now the lower her fall shall be!" exclaimed the relentless girl, with her low, reckless laugh, "mother, I shall not fail of my revenge!"
Ah! Felise Herbert! The coils of fate are tightening around you like a deadly serpent while you exult in your wickedness.