To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips.
"I always thought them overstrained till now."
"I perfectly agree with you," said Mr. Rayne: "I knew we were congenial spirits." Then he said a word or two in a diabolical language to his groom, who ran to the carriage which I had been watching and repeated it to the lady: she bowed and smiled to Mr. Rayne, and soon drew up her ponies beside us.
"My wife," said Mr. Rayne with laughter in his eyes.
Mrs. Rayne talked much like other people, and her beauty ceased to dazzle me after a few minutes; not that it grew less on near view, but, being a woman, I could not fall in love with her in the nature of things.
When the music stopped we drove to Mr. Rayne's house, his wife keeping easily beside us. When she was occupied with the others Mr. Rayne whispered, "Her praises were so sweet in my ears that I would not own myself Sir Lancelot at once."
"If you are Sir Lancelot," I said, "where is King Arthur?"
"Forty fathoms deep, I hope," said Mr. Rayne with a sudden change in his voice and a darkening face. I had raised a ghost for him without knowing it, and he spoke no more till we reached the house.
It was a long, low, spreading structure with a thatched roof, and a verandah round it. A wilderness of tropical plants hemmed it in. But all appearance of simplicity vanished on our entrance. In the matted hall stood a tree to receive the light coverings we had worn; not a "hat tree," as we say at home by poetic license, but the counterfeit presentment of a real tree, carved in branches and delicate foliage out of black wood. The drawing-room was eight-sided, and would have held, with some margin, the gambrel-roofed house, chimneys and all, in which I had spent my life. Two sides were open into other rooms, with Corinthian pillars reaching to the roof. Carved screens a little higher than our heads filled the space between the pillars, and separated the drawing-room from Mrs. Rayne's boudoir on the side and the dining-room on the other.