e will be all right with a little looking after," Borrowdean said.
"Forgive me, but it is getting late."

"I will go at once," she said.

* * * * *

Afterwards she wondered often at that strange, uncertain fluttering of
the heart, the rush and glow of feelings warmer than any which had lately
stirred her, which seemed in those first few minutes of their being
together, to make an altered woman of her. Mannering, as he entered the
room, pale and listless, was conscious at once of a foreign element in
it, something which stirred his somewhat slow-beating pulse, too, which
seemed to bring back to him a flood of delicious memories, the perfume of
his rose-gardens at evening, the soft night music of his wind-stirred
cedars. She had thrown aside her opera cloak. The delicate lines of her
bust seemed to have expanded with the unusual rise and fall of her bosom.
A faint rose-tint flush of streaming colour had stained the ivory
whiteness of her skin--her eyes as they sought his were soft, almost
liquid. They met so seldom alone--and she was alone now with him in the
room which was so characteristically his own, a room with many
indications of his constant presence, which one by one she had been
realizing with curiously quickened pulses during the few minutes of
waiting. On her way here, driving in an open victoria, through the soft
summer evening, she had seemed to be pursued everywhere by a new world of
sensuous suggestions. Of the many carriages which she had passed, hers
alone seemed to savour of loneliness. She was the only beautiful woman
who sat alone and companionless. In a momentary block she had seen a man
in a neighbouring hansom slip his hand, a strong, brown, well-looking
hand, under the apron, to hold for a moment the fingers of the woman who
sat by his side--Berenice had caught the answering smile, she had seen
him lean forward and whisper something which had brought a deeper flush
into her own cheeks and a look into her eyes, half amused, half tender.
These were rare moments with her, these moments of sentiment--perhaps for
that reason all the more dangerous. She forgot almost the cause of her
coming. She remembered only that she was alone with the one man whose
voice had the power to thrill her, whose touch would call up into life
the great hidden forces of her own passionate nature. The memory of all
other things passed away from her like a cloud gone from the face of the
sun. Sh