“I am proud of him!” the musical voice of the fair hostess replied, with a note of tenderness breaking through its proud ring; then she bowed good-night to her friends and went back to the deserted drawing-room, around whose door hovered sleepy servants anxious to put out the lights, shut up the house and retire.
Their proud mistress paid no attention to them. She pushed to the door, and began to walk slowly up and down the floor, the rich Turkish carpet giving back no echo to the fall of her silken slippers.
A woman in the early prime of her rich beauty, thirty-three years old, but looking barely twenty-five—beauty is always young—tall, with a magnificent figure draped in black lace that set off with its somber elegance her peculiar type of beauty.
Red hair—rich, dusky auburn red, with soft natural waves in it from where it was drawn simply back from its parting on the low white brow to the loose coil at the back of the shapely head; the clear, colorless, dazzling skin that goes with such fiery locks; eyes of sparkling reddish hazel with full, white lids and long, curled lashes; a Grecian nose long enough to indicate decided characteristics; a rather large mouth, with thin red lips that could express cruelty when they chose, but whose smile could dazzle and betray—such she stood in her somber garb, with diamonds flashing on her bare white arms and throat, looking the siren that she was by right of beauty, passion and power, yet all inconsistency, capable of heights and depths, and predominated by something subtle and tigerish in her animal nature.
“Will he come to-night?” she muttered, half bitterly, as she paced from one end to the other of the splendid room. “It is more than two weeks since I came to our winter home in Jacksonville. Why did he wish to linger, unless it was to be rid of me, to be from his chains, as no doubt he calls them in his secret heart? What has he been doing all this time? I will not believe it was business, as he writes. Had he loved me as he pretends, he would have come with me; he—”
The door opened quickly, arresting the querulous complaint. She turned and saw her husband coming toward her with an eager face, and his name fell from her lips in a tone of mingled reproach and rapture:
“Norman!”
“Camille!” he answered, in a deep voice; and as he paused by her side his dark eyes swept the dazzling face searchingly, and somewhat plaintively, as if doubtful of a welcome.
But she flung herself upon his breast, and her round, white arms clasped his neck with passionate abandon.
His momentary doubt dispelled, he embraced her with an ardor equaling her own, and pressed kiss after kiss on her upturned face.