She was radiant with excitement, happiness,
youth. She culled admiration, visiting all eyes with hers as a bee all
flowers. It was not the flowers she cared for.
He did not see her dress; he did not recognize the garments that had hung on
the wall of his room. What he did see and continued to see was the fact that
she was there and dancing with Joseph.
If he had stepped on a rattlesnake, he could not have been more horribly,
more miserably stung. He had the sense of being poisoned, as though actual
venom were coursing through his blood. There was one swift backward movement
of his mind over the chain of forerunning events.
"She is a venomous little serpent!" he groaned aloud. "And I have been
crawling in the dust to her, to be stung like this!" He walked quietly into
the house.
He sought his hostess first. He found her in the centre of a group of
ladies, wearing the toilet of the past Revolutionary period in the capitals
of the East. The vision dazzled him, bewildered him. But he swept his eye
over them with one feeling of heart-sickness and asked his hostess one
question: was Mrs. Falconer there? She was not.
In another room he found his host, and a group of Revolutionary officers and
other tried historic men, surrounding the Governor.
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