"You will allow me to present you to my wife, Mr. Dane," said the host, breaking the silence with an effort.
The artist bowed and they moved down the long room side by side, the old man with his white face and silvery beard, the young one with his princely grace and refined beauty.
Leslie Dane had been most reluctant to attend the ball given by the American colonel, but Carl Muller had teased him into compliance. He had nerved himself for the trial, and found that he could bear the contact with one from his native land with more sang froid than he expected.
"Now I shall see the old lady," was his half-smiling comment to himself as he walked along. "I wonder if she is very angry with me because I would not paint her portrait."
The next moment, before he had time to raise his eyes, he found himself bowing hurriedly at the sound of his host's voice uttering the usual formal words of introduction.
Bonnibel was standing alone by a tall jardiniere of flowers, looking downward a little thoughtfully. She was dressed as Undine, in a floating robe of sea-green, with billows of snowy tulle, looped with water-lilies and sea-grasses, and lightly embroidered with pearls and tiny sea-shells. Her appropriate ornaments were aquamarines in a setting of golden shells. Her long, golden hair fell unbound over her shoulders and rippled to her waist, enveloping her form in a halo of brightness. She looked like a beautiful siren of old ocean, as fair and fresh and beautiful as Venus when she first arose from its coral caves.
Someone had said to her just a moment before, "Mrs. Carlyle, you look like a beautiful picture," and the words had recalled to her mind the great artist who had refused to paint her portrait.
"I wonder if Mr. Deane is here to-night," she was thinking, when Colonel Carlyle's voice spoke suddenly beside her, and she bowed haughtily, actuated by a little feeling of pique, and lifted her sea-blue eyes to the face of the artist. She met his gaze fixed steadily upon her with a look of utter surprise, bitter pain and bitterer scorn upon his deathly pale face. In an instant the tide of time rolled backward and these two, standing face to face the first time in years, knew each other!
Ah, me! how could she bear the revelation that flashed over her so swiftly, and live through its horror, its shame and disgrace! The words she had been about to speak died unuttered on her lips, the lights, the flowers, the stern, set face of Leslie Dane, all swam before her eyes as things "seen in a glass, darkly." She threw up her hands blindly and reeled backward, striking against the light jardiniere as she fell. It was overturned by the shock, and scattered its wealth of flowers about her as she lay there unconscious, as beautiful, as fragile, as innocent as they.
For a moment neither Colonel Carlyle nor Leslie Dane moved or spoke. It was a third person who pushed past them and lifted the fair, inanimate form. For Colonel Carlyle, there was murder seething in his jealous heart that moment, and in the breast of Leslie Dane a grand scorn was strangling every emotion of pity.