"She had not your constancy, my darling!" murmurs her lover. "To think that for all these years you held me shrined in the proud little heart that I thought so cold and unforgiving once! How true a love was yours!"
"It had need to be true if it was so unforgiving," she says, smiling up into the dark eyes that search her own. "When I think of those long, wasted years——"
"Do not think of them," he interrupts passionately, "or think of them only to crowd into those that are to come, a double portion of the love they have missed."
And with his lips on hers she is content, indeed, that it should be so.
CHAPTER XXXI
Alone in her rooms in Paris, Lady Jean sits perplexing herself over ways and means. She is awfully in debt, even though she has let the country-house, and supplemented her income by another five hundred a year. She is angry with herself for having refused Sir Francis' assistance and too proud to call him to her side. She can think of no scheme by which to baffle Lauraine, and though she knows her rival is condemned to a species of exile, and that she is as unhappy as a woman can well be, that in no way comforts her for the fact of her own defeat.
Her position is full of peril and uncertainty. She can no longer float on the smooth waters of Society, for Society is shocked and outraged by her husband's misdeeds, and an ill odour clings to her name. The people she gathers round her now are not at all the class of people she prefers. Needy foreigners, second-rate celebrities; Englishmen with shady reputations and tarnished titles; French Bohemians who have known and admired her in the days of her success—all these congregate together at her little rooms in the Rue Victoire; and among them all she looks for some willing tool who will lend himself to her hand and work out her schemes.
But for long she looks in vain.
The winter passes on. The cool, fresh days of early spring are heralded by bursts of sunshine, by the tender budding leafage of the Boulevards, by the scents and hues of flowers that are piled up in the baskets of the market women, and fill the windows of the fleuristes with brilliance and beauty once again. And in the springtime, suddenly and without warning, Lady Jean's scheme of vengeance comes to her as a vision of possibility at last, for who should come to Paris but Keith Athelstone.