Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/147

Rh happiness of her life, she had almost outlived the faculty of feeling or of suffering, and must henceforth exist only for the world—a distinguished actress in the great comedy of fashionable life.

She is standing in a window filled with exotics, which form a great screen of dark green leaves and tropical flowers, through which the blue spring sky looks in, clear, bright, and cold. She is talking to an elderly duchess, a languid and rather faded personage, dressed in ruby velvet, and equally distinguished for the magnificence of her lace and the artful composition of her complexion, which is as near an approach to nature as can be achieved by pearl-powder. "And you leave France in a month, to take possession of your estates in South America?" she asks.

"In a month, yes," says Valerie, playing with the large dark leaf of a magnolia. "I am anxious to see my mother's native country. I am tired of Paris."

"Really? You surprise me!" The languid duchess cannot conceive the possibility of any one being tired of a Parisian existence. She is deep in her thirty-fourth platonic attachment—the object, a celebrated novelist of the transcendental school; and as at this moment she sees him entering the room by a distant door, she strolls away from the window, carrying her perfumed complexion through the delighted crowd.

Perhaps Monsieur Raymond Marolles, standing talking to an old Buonapartist general, whose breast is one constellation of stars and crosses, had only been waiting for this opportunity, for he advanced presently with soft step and graceful carriage towards the ottoman on which his bride had seated herself. She was trifling with her costly bridal bouquet as the bridegroom approached her, plucking the perfumed petals one by one, and scattering them on the ground at her feet in very wantonness.

"Valerie," he said, bending over her, and speaking in tones which, by reason of the softness of their intonation, might have been tender, but for the want of some diviner melody from within the soul of the man; not having which, they had the false jingle of a spurious coin.

The spot in which the bride was seated was so sheltered by the flowers and the satin hangings which shrouded the window, that it formed a little alcove, shut out from the crowded room.

"Valerie!" he repeated; and finding that she did not answer, he laid his white ungloved hand upon her jewelled wrist.

She started to her feet, drawing herself up to her fullest height, and shaking off his hand with a gesture which, had he been the foulest and most loathsome reptile crawling upon the