“Do you know what your face has done to me, Marguerite?” he asks slowly.
She does not reply, but somehow this face of hers seems to have come nearer him, and through a bewildered haze he sees nothing but a pair of lips, soft and maddening; a pair of eyes, black as midnight, lustrous as two stars, with a depth of passion in their liquid depths that stirs his pulse and makes his head whirl.
It is a picture that brings oblivion of everything, save of dangerous proximity.
“I told you a falsehood the other day, Marguerite, when I said I was not married. I am married! I have not been married two years, and I married for love. My wife loves me with all her soul, and it would break her heart to lose me, and yet—Heaven forgive me!—I feel to-night as if I hated her! because she seems to rise up between you and me.”
She averts her face, and a little smile passes quickly over her mouth—a smile that has triumph in it, a smile that is absolutely wicked.
“When I entered this house to-night something told me of the end. It seems utter folly for a man to go mad over a woman’s face like this, doesn’t it? But, Marguerite, it is so. I have gone mad, I believe, for, strangers as we were but three short days ago, I love you as I never loved anyone before! I swear it, Marguerite!”
She does not smile now at his rhapsody. She knows he is watching her, and he sees nothing but the sweetest, tenderest light in the wonderful eyes, a softer look on the perfect mouth.
“Strange!” she says simply, “that we should have felt the same to-night—that——”
“We?” he interrupts. “Say that again, Marguerite!”
“Yes! Did I not tell you the first time we spoke that you were—my fate!” And Marguerite’s head is very close to his shoulder, and her lips seem to seek his. But she starts away hastily as De Belcour, unannounced, strides into the room.