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shamming or an evanescent preference--for one of them above another. Sir Vane Masham set her down over his third dinner's sherry as "an iceberg," in which kind opinion the little viscount joined, with the amendment of "polar refrigerator." Young Arthur French, who was very hard hit indeed, said she was like a "beautiful, heartless marble statue," but the poet, who had made verses on her, called her a "white lily with a heart of flame." Not one of them all, however, could dispute the perfect quality of her beauty to-night. In a robe of violet satin, with pale jealous topazes shining on her neck and arms and in the sleek braids of her dark hair, Hyacinthe was fit for the regards of emperors had they been there to see. They were not. In the conservatory at Stokeham, where she stood amid the tropical trees and flowers and breathing the warm close scent of rich blossoms foreign to English soil, there was only one man to look at her, and he was no potentate, but a blond young fellow, with blue blood in his veins and a sad riot in his heart. For the first time since they have been in the house together he has left his betrothed wife's side and sought hers: in the face of this little watching world about him he has, at last, quietly risen from the seat at Florence Ffolliott's side and followed that trail of sheeny satin into the conservatory. "Not one word for me?" he says in a low voice that has in it a sort of desperation. She turns startled and looks at him: "Who wants me? Who sent you to fetch me?" "No one 'sent' me," he replies bitterly: "I 'want' you. Hyacinthe! Hyacinthe!" He stretches two arms out toward her, and when he dies Roy Chandoce remembers the look that leaps then into the eyes of this girl. "Do not touch me!" She shrinks away with the expression of awakened womanhood on her fair face. "If you do, you will make me mad." For he has followed and is close to her. "No, no, no! Not 'mad'--happy! Ah, Hyacinthe!" His arms are no more outstretched or empty: they enfold all the beauty and all the bliss that now and then give mortality fresh faith in heaven. "Ah, Hyacinthe!" That is all that he says, and she is silent while his kisses fall upon her mouth and cheeks and brow and hands. And when, ten minutes later, he goes back where he came from, he knows that it is no "intellectual disloyalty" that lured him from his seat: he knows that the poet was right, and Vane and the viscount and Arthur all wrong.
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