"With pleasure, dear lady! It is your will to load me with benefits, and
you must be gratified," replied Rosa, with a faint smile.
"Then I will come myself and fetch you, a little before the hour," added
Sybil, playfully throwing a kiss as she darted through the door.
When she re-entered her own apartment, she found her husband impatiently
pacing up and down the floor.
"How very long you have been, my darling Sybil," he said, with all the
fondness of a newly-wedded lover, as he went to meet her.
"Oh, I am so glad you thought it long!" she answered mischievously, as
she took his hand and pulled him to the big easy-chair and pushed him
down into it.
"Sit down there, and listen to me," she said, with a pretty little air
of authority. Then she drew an ottoman to his side and sunk down upon
it, and leaned her arms upon his knees, and lifted her beautiful dark
face, now all aglow with the delight of benevolence, and told him all
that had passed in the interview between herself and Mrs. Blondelle.
And Lyon Berners, with his arm over her graceful shoulders, his fingers
stringing her silken black ringlets, and his eyes gazing with infinite
tenderness and admiration down on her eloquent face, listened with
attentive interest to the story. But at its close, great was his
astonishment.
"My dear, impulsive Sybil, what have you done!" he exclaimed.
"What!" echoed Sybil, her crimson lips breathlessly apart--her dark eyes
dilated.
"Love, you have invited a perfect stranger, casually met at a hotel--a
gambler's wife, even by her own showing, an adventuress by all other
appearances, to come and take up her abode with us for an indefinite
length of time!"
Sybil's mouth opened, and her eyes dilated with an almost comical
expression of dismay. She had not a word to say in self-defence!
"Do not think I blame you, dear, warm, imprudent heart! I only wonder at
you, and--adore you!" he said, earnestly pressing her to his bosom.
"Oh, but you would have done as I did, if you had seen her distress!"
pleaded Sybil, recovering her powers of speech.
"But could you not have helped her without inviting her home with us?"
"But how?" inquired Sybil.
"Could you not have paid her board? or lent her money?"
"Oh, Lyon! Lyon!" said Sybil, slowly shaking her head and looking up in
his face with a heavenly benevolence beaming through her own. "Oh, Lyon!
it was not a boarding-house she wanted, it was a refuge, a home with
friends! But I am very sorry if this displeases you."
"Dear, impetuous, self-forgetting child! I am not so impious as to find
fault with you."
"But you do not like the lady's coming."