"You have been near the rose," she murmured, and pressed them to her lips in sudden, passionate love and sorrow. She could not help it. They spoke to her so plainly of the proud man who had won her heart all unwittingly. They made her think of the princely form, the dark, luring, splendid face, the proud, cynical, dark eyes, the curling lips like that once or twice only she had seen curved into a beautiful smile, subtly sweet and dangerous, which women had worshiped blindly, but which only shone upon them to betray their hopes to ruin.
She held the flowers, kissed them again and again, then threw them far from her in a sudden revulsion of feeling bordering on supreme self-contempt.
"Ah, if I could throw my hopeless passion from me thus lightly," she sighed.
She found the book she wished, and, tempted by the deep silence and quiet of the room, decided to remain awhile at least. With her fair head resting on her arm she began to read aloud softly, after an old habit of hers:
"'You walk the sunny side of fate,
The wise world smiles and calls you great.
The golden fruitage of success
Drops at your feet in plenteousness;
And you have blessings manifold;
Renown and power and friends and gold,
They build a wall between us twain
That may not be thrown down again.
Alas! for I the long time through
Have loved you better than you knew.'"
Suddenly a sweet, chilly breath of night air blew over her. She looked up and saw St. Leon Le Roy parting the heavy curtains of silk and lace at the bay-window behind which he had been quietly sitting smoking a cigar.
Bewildered, startled, Laurel threw down her book and sprung up in ignominious flight.
The master of Eden coolly caught her hands and forced her back into her seat.
"Why need you always fly from me as though I were an ogre?" he said, plaintively. "I shall not eat you, child, tempted as I might be to do so."
"I—I thought myself alone," she stammered, crimsoning under his mocking raillery.