To the woman who watched and listened from the parapet above, it seemed a panel rosy, dewy, fresh from Tempe, set as a fresco upon the walls of Hell, to heighten the horrors of the doomed.

From her chalice fate had stolen all that was sweet and rapturous in wifehood and motherhood, substituting hemlock; and as the vision of her own fair child was recalled by the sleeping babe of the Italian fisherman, she suffered a keen pang in the consciousness that those tender features of her innocent daughter reproduced vividly the image of the man who had blackened her life.

The face in Regina’s portrait was so thoroughly Laurance in outline and Laurance in colour, that the mother had covered it with a thick veil, unable to meet the deep violet eyes that she had learned to hate in Rene Laurance and his son.

Yet for the sake of that daughter, whose gaze she shunned, she was about to step down into flames far fiercer than those of Tophet, silently immolating all that remained of her life.

Although she neither turned her head nor removed her eyes from the sea, she knew that the end was at hand.  For one instant her heart seemed to cease beating, then with a keen spasm of pain slowly resumed its leaden labour.

The erect, graceful, manly figure at her side bent down, and the grizzled moustache touched her forehead.

“Odille, I accept your terms.  Henceforth in accordance with your own conditions you are mine; mine in the sight of God and man.”

Recoiling, she drew her handkerchief across the spot where his lips had rested, and her voice sounded strangely cold and haughty: 

“God holds Himself aloof from such sacrilege as this, and sometimes I think He does not witness, or surely would forbid.  Just yet, you must not touch me.  You accept the conditions named, and I shall hold myself bound by the stipulations; but until I am your wife, until you take my hand as Mrs. Laurance, you will pardon me if I absolutely prohibit all caresses.  I am very frank, you see, and doubtless you consider me peculiar, probably prudish, but only a husband’s lips can touch mine, only a husband’s arm encircle me.  When we are married——­”

She did not complete the sentence, but a peculiar musical laugh rippled over her lips, and she held out her hand to him.

“Remember, I promised General Laurance only my hand, and here I surrender it.  You have fairly earned it, but I fear it will not prove the guerdon you fondly imagine.”

He kissed it tenderly, and keeping it in his, spoke very earnestly: 

“Only one thing, Odille, I desire to stipulate, and that springs solely from my jealous love.  You must promise to abandon the stage for ever.  Indeed, my beautiful darling, I could not endure to see my wife, my own, before the footlights.  In Mrs. Laurance the world must lose its lovely idol.”