"To make my lady's husband love her."
I felt my face becoming crimson, but my heart was sore, so in my simplicity I bought the charm and was smuggling it into my bag when I became aware that one of my fellow-passengers, a lady, was looking down at me.
She was a tall, singularly handsome woman, fashionably and (although on shipboard) almost sumptuously dressed. A look in her face was haunting me with a memory I could not fix when she stooped and said:
"Aren't you Mary O'Neill?"
The voice completed the identification, and I knew who it was. It was Alma Lier.
She was now about seven-and-twenty and in the prime of her young womanhood. Her beautiful auburn hair lay low over her broad forehead, almost descending to her long sable-coloured eyebrows. Her cheeks were very white, (rather beyond the whiteness of nature, I thought), and her lips were more than commonly red, with the upper one a little thin and the lower slightly set forward. But her eyes were still her distinguishing feature, being larger and blacker than before and having that vivid gaze that looked through and through you and made you feel that few women and no man in the world would have the power to resist her.
Her movements were almost noiseless, and as she sank into the chair by my side there was a certain over-sweetness in the soft succulent tones of the voice with which she began to tell me what had happened to her since I had seen her last.
It was a rather painful story. After two or three years in a girls' college in her own country she had set out with her mother for a long tour of the European capitals. In Berlin, at what was falsely called a Charity Ball, she had met a young Russian Count who was understood to be rich and related to one of the Grand Ducal families. Against the protests of her father (a shrewd American banker), she had married the Count, and they had returned to New York, where her mother had social ambitions.
There they had suffered a serious shock. It turned out that her husband had deceived them, and that he was really a poor and quite nameless person, only remotely related to the family he claimed to belong to.
Nevertheless Alma had "won out" at last. By digging deep into her father's treasury she got rid of her treacherous husband, and going "way out west," she had been able, in due time, to divorce him.