The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sacrifice, by Stephen French Whitman

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Title: Sacrifice

Author: Stephen French Whitman

Release Date: October 9, 2007 [eBook #22928]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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SACRIFICE

by

STEPHEN FRENCH WHITMAN

Author of "Predestined," Etc.

[Frontispiece: "COME CLOSER, I WANT TO LOOK AT YOU."]

D. Appleton and Company
New York :: 1922 :: London

Copyright, 1922, by
D. Appleton and Company

Copyright, 1921-1922, by The Ridgway Company

SACRIFICE

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Lilla Delliver's parents, killed in a railway accident, left their
child a legacy other than the fortune that the New York newspapers
mentioned in the obituaries.

The mother had been tall, blonde, rather wildly handsome, with the look
of one of those neurotic queens who suppress under a proud manner many
psychic disturbances. Painfully fastidious in her tastes, she had
avoided every unnecessary contact with mediocrity. Reclining on a
couch in her boudoir, she read French novels saturated with an
exquisite sophistication. Then, letting the book slip from her
fingers, she gazed into space, as listless as a lady immured in a
seraglio on the Bosphorous. At night, if the opera was _Tristan_, she
went down to her limousine with the furtive eagerness of a woman
escaping from monotony into a secret world. She drove home with
feverish cheeks, and when her husband spoke to her she gave him the
blank stare of a somnambulist.

After a busy social season she was liable to melancholia. She sat by
the window in a charming negligee, paler than a camellia, hardly
turning her head when, at twilight, her child was led in to kiss her.

Recovering, somehow, she traveled.

On those journeys every possible h