Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/132

Rh Keith demanded, "who attacked you in that fashion? He asked to be introduced. There's an honor! Mademoiselle, vous êtes parfaitement belle."

"He was very ugly himself," said Nora.

Hubert was a lover of the luxuries and splendors of life. He had no immediate personal need of them; he could make his terms with narrow circumstances; but his imagination was a born aristocrat. He liked to be reminded that certain things were,—ambassadors, ambassadorial compliments, Old-World drawing-rooms with duskily moulded ceilings. Nora's beauty, to his vision, took a deeper color from this homage of an old starched and embroidered diplomatist. It was valid, it had passed the ordeal. He had little need at table to play at discreet inattention. Mrs. Keith, preoccupied with her housekeeping and the "dreadful state" in which her freshly departed tenants had left her rooms, indulged in a tragic monologue and dispensed with responses. Nora, looking frankly at Hubert, consoled their hostess with gentle optimism; and Hubert returned her looks, wondering. He mused upon the mystery of beauty. What sudden magic had made her so handsome? She was the same tender slip of girlhood who had come trembling to hear him preach a year before; the same, yet how different! And how sufficient she had grown, withal, to her beauty! How with the added burden had come an added strength,—with the greater charm a greater force,—a force subtle, sensitive, just faintly self-suspecting. Then came the thought that all this was Roger's,—Roger's speculation, Roger's property! He pitied the poor fellow, lying senseless and helpless instead of sitting there