Beyond the Rocks

Meanwhile, from the beginning of dinner, Lord Bracondale had been saying

to himself she was the loveliest white flower he had yet struck in a

path of varied experiences. Her eyes so innocent and true, with the

tender expression of a fawn; the perfect turn of her head and slender

pillar of a throat; her grace and gentleness, all appealed to him in a

maddening way.

"She is asleep to the whole of life's possibilities," he thought. "What

can her husband be about, and what an intoxicatingly agreeable task to

wake her up!"

He had lived among the world where the awaking of young wives, or old

wives, or any woman who could please man, was the natural course of the

day. It never even struck him then it might be a cruel thing to do. A

woman once married was always fair game; if the husband could not retain

her affections that was his lookout.

Hector Bracondale was not a brute, just an ordinary Englishman of the

world, who had lived and loved and seen many lands.

He read Theodora like an open book: he knew exactly why she had talked

about the weather after Jean d'Agrève. It thrilled him to see her soft

eyes dreamy and luminous when they first spoke of the book, and it

flattered him when she changed the conversation.

As for Theodora, she analyzed nothing, she only felt that perhaps she

ought not to speak about love to one of those people who could never be

husbands.

Captain Fitzgerald, meanwhile, was making tremendous headway with the

widow. He flattered her vanity, he entertained her intelligence, and he

even ended by letting her see she was causing him, personally, great

emotion.

At last this promising evening came to an end. The Russian Prince, with

his American Princess, got up to say good-night, and gradually the party

broke up, but not before Captain Fitzgerald had arranged to meet Mrs.

McBride at Doucet's in the morning, and give her the benefit of his

taste and experience in a further shopping expedition to buy old

bronzes.

"We can all breakfast together at Henry's," he said, with his grand

manner, which included the whole party; and for one instant force of

habit made Theodora's heart sink with fear at the prospect of the bill,

as it had often had to do in olden days when her father gave these royal

invitations. Then she remembered she had not been sacrificed to Josiah

Brown for nothing, and that even if dear, generous papa should happen to

be a little hard up again, a few hundred francs would be nothing to her

to slip into his hand before starting.