In the drawing room of her mansion on Grosvenor Square, Lady Alice Mordaunt was pouring tea, and talking as usual the same trifling commonplaces that had on a previous occasion excited her cousin's disdain. Opposite her sat her mother, Lady Fletcher, a perfect model of the well-bred English matron, while Opal Ledoux, in the daintiest and fluffiest of summer costumes, was curled up like a kitten in a corner of the window-seat, apparently engrossed in a book, but in reality watching the passers-by.
From her childhood up she had lived in a Castle of Dreams, which she had peopled with the sort of men and women that suited her own fanciful romantic ideas, and where she herself was supposed to lie asleep until her ideal knight, the Prince Charming of the story, came across land and sea to storm the Castle and wake her with a kiss.
It was made up of moonbeams and rays of sunshine and rainbow-gleams—this dream—woven by fairy fingers into so fragile a cobweb that it seemed absurd to think it could stand the winds and torrents of Grown-Up Land; but Opal, in spite of her eighteen years, was still awaiting the coming of her ideal knight, though the stage setting of the drama, and her picture of just how the Prince Charming of her dreams was to look, and what he would say, had changed materially with the passing of the years.
If sometimes she wove strange lines of tragedy throughout the dreams, out of the threads of shadow that flitted across the sunshine of her life, she did not reject them. She felt they belonged there and did not shrink, even when her young face paled at the curious self-pity the passing of the thought invoked.
Hers was a strange mixture, made up of an unusual intermingling of many bloods. Born in New Orleans, of a father who was a direct descendant of the early French settlers of Louisiana, and of a Creole mother, who might have traced her ancestry back to one of the old grandees of Spain, she yet clung with a jealous affection to the land of her birth and called herself defiantly "a thorough-bred American!" Her mother had died in giving her birth, and her father, while she was still too young to remember, had married a fair Englishwoman who had tried hard to be a mother to the strange little creature whose blood leaped and danced within her veins with all the fire and romance of foreign suns. Gay and pleasure-mad as she usually appeared, there was always the shadow of a heartache in her eye, and one felt the possibility of a tragedy in her nature. In fact one felt intuitively sorry—almost afraid—for her lest her daring, adventurous spirit should lead her too close to the precipice along the rocky pathway of life.
She was thinking many strange thoughts as she sat looking out of the window. Her English cousins, related to her only through her stepmother, yet called kin for courtesy's sake, had given up trying to understand her complexities, as she had likewise given up trying to explain herself. If they were pleased forever to consider her in the light of a conundrum, she thought, why—let them!
After a while the ladies at the tea-table began to chat in more confidential tones. Opal was not too oblivious to her surroundings to notice, nor to grasp the fact that they were discussing her, but that knowledge did not interest her. She was so used to being considered a curiosity that it had ceased to have any special concern for her. She only hoped that they would sometime succeed in understanding her better than she had yet learned to understand herself. It might have interested her, however, had she overheard this particular conversation, for it shed a great light upon certain shades of character she had discovered in herself and often wondered about, but had never had explained to her.
But she did not hear.
"I am greatly concerned about Opal," Lady Alice was saying. "She is the most difficult creature, Mamma—you've no idea how peculiar—with the most dangerous, positively immoral ideas. I do wish she were safely married, for then—well, there is really no knowing what might happen to a girl who thinks and talks as she does. I used to think it might be a sort of American pose—put on for startling effect, you know—but I begin to think she actually means it!"
"Yes, she means it," replied Lady Fletcher, lowering her voice discreetly, till it was little more than a whisper. "She has always had just such notions. It gives Amy a great deal of trouble and worry to keep her straight. You know—or perhaps you didn't know, for we don't talk of these things often, especially when they are in one's family—but there is a bad strain in her blood and they are always looking for it to crop out somewhere. Her mother married happily—and escaped the curse—but for several generations back the women of her family have been of peculiar temperament and—they've usually gone wrong sometime in their lives. It seems to be in the blood. They can't help it. Mr. Ledoux told Amy all about it at the time of their marriage, and that is the reason they have tried to keep Opal as secluded as possible from the usual free-and-easy associations of American girls, and are so anxious to marry her off wisely."