“Quite, quite true, so help me Heaven! Marguerite, you don’t really doubt me! Have you lived till now, and never learnt that a man often fears to try and climb to the highest pinnacle of his desire, be it for fame, or fortune, or bliss, lest he fall before he has tasted it. Don’t you know what your face can do to a man?”
She shakes her head, and the bright light glistening on it seems to turn each tress to living gold.
“It can send him into a dream of Heaven! fire his soul with rapture, or drive him mad with disappointment and regret!”
He pauses, a little breathless. Sentiment is not a plant of common or spontaneous growth in our aristocracy, and it is not at all in Lord Delaval’s line.
The age is far too practical for it, more’s the pity.
He is, in fact, a little astonished at his flight of eloquence, mediocre though it be, and a little silence ensues.
Then Marguerite Ange leans forward, puts her white hand, all sparkling with gems, on his arm and looks up in his face.
He is certainly the handsomest man she has ever seen.
“The last would never be your fate,” she says, in a low, thrilling tone; but he hears her, of course. Trust a man, even if he is partially deaf, not to hear any sort of incense to his vanity, if he can hear nothing else; and this man is especially vain, from the top of his blond head to the sole of his well-made boot.
His ultramarine eyes kindle at once into great fires, and the red spots glow on his cheeks to match.