He had never looked handsomer than at that moment, as, slightly bending his head in homage, his dangerously beautiful eyes rested with an unmistakable expression upon the faultless features before him; and watching him, a cold smile broke up the icy outline of his companion’s delicate lips: 

“American beauty might question the sincerity of a champion whose worship is offered only at foreign shrines, and the precious oblation of whose heart is laid on distant and strange altars.”

“Ah, Madame,—­neither at foreign shrines nor strange altars, but ever unwaveringly at the feet of my divine countrywomen.  Is it needful that I recross the ocean to bow before the reigning muse?  Is it not conceded that the brightest, loveliest planet in Parisian skies, brought all her splendour from my western home?”

“How you barb with keen regret the mortifying reflection that I, alas! cannot as an American lay claim to a moiety of your chivalric allegiance!  Ill-fated Odille Orme!”

The stinging sarcasm in the liquid voice perplexed him, and the strange lambent light that seemed now and then to ray out of the brilliant eyes that had never wandered from his, sent an uncomfortable thrill over him.

“Surely the world cannot have erred in according to my own country the honour of your nationality?”

“I was born upon a French ship, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Ah, dearest Madame! then it is no marvel that, as you have inherited the cestus of Aphrodite, your votaries bow as blindly, as helplessly, as those over whom your ancient Greek mother ruled so despotically.  By divine right of birth you should reign as Odille Anadyomene.”

“Madame Odille Orme has abjured the pagan aesthetics that seem to trench rather closely upon Mr. Laurance’s ethics, and shed far too rosy an Orientalism over his mind and heart; and hopes he will not forget her proud boast that by divine right she wears a dearer, nobler, holier title—­Odille Orme, wife and mother.”

Bolder libertinism than found shelter in Mr. Laurance’s perverted nature, would have cowered before the pure face that now leaned far forward, with dilated, scornful eyes which seemed to run like electric rays up and down the secret chambers of his heart.

Involuntarily he shrank back into the depths of his chair, and mutely questioned as on the previous night, “Where have I heard that voice before?”

With some difficulty he recovered himself, and said hastily: 

“Will you forgive me if I tell you frankly, that ever since I saw you last night I have been tantalized by a vague yet very precious consciousness that somewhere you and I have met before?  When or where, I cannot conjecture, but of one thing I am painfully certain, we can never be strangers henceforth.  Some charm in your voice, in the expression of your eyes when as ‘Amy Robsart’ the loving woman you looked so fondly into your ‘Leicester’s’ face, awoke dim memories that will never sleep again.  Happy—­enviable indeed—­that Leicester who really rules the empire of your love.”