th which he had
gone to Beaton. She was furious with shame and resentment; she told him
he had made bad worse, that he had made a fool of himself to no end; she
spared neither his age nor his grief-broken spirit, in which his will
could not rise against hers. She filled the house with her rage,
screaming it out upon him; but when her fury was once spent, she began to
have some hopes from what her father had done. She no longer kept her
bed; every evening she dressed herself in the dress Beaton admired the
most, and sat up till a certain hour to receive him. She had fixed a day
in her own mind before which, if he came, she would forgive him all he
had made her suffer: the mortification, the suspense, the despair. Beyond
this, she had the purpose of making her father go to Europe; she felt
that she could no longer live in America, with the double disgrace that
had been put upon her.

Beaton rang, and while the servant was coming the insolent caprice seized
him to ask for the young ladies instead of the old man, as he had
supposed of course he should do. The maid who answered the bell, in the
place of the reluctant Irishman of other days, had all his hesitation in
admitting that the young ladies were at home.

He found Mela in the drawing-room. At sight of him she looked scared; but
she seemed to be reassured by his calm. He asked if he was not to have
the pleasure of seeing Miss Dryfoos, too; and Mela said she reckoned the
girl had gone up-stairs to tell her. Mela was in black, and Beaton noted
how well the solid sable became her rich red-blonde beauty; he wondered
what the effect would be with Christine.

But she, when she appeared, was not in mourning. He fancied that she wore
the lustrous black silk, with the breadths of white Venetian lace about
the neck which he had praised, because he praised it. Her cheeks burned
with a Jacqueminot crimson; what should be white in her face was chalky
white. She carried a plumed ostrich fan, black and soft, and after giving
him her hand, sat down and waved it to and fro slowly, as he remembered
her doing the night they first met. She had no ideas, except such as
related intimately to herself, and she had no gabble, like Mela; and she
let him talk. It was past the day when she promised herself she would
forgive him; but as he talked on she felt all her passion for him revive,
and the conflict of desires, the desire to hate, the desire to love, made
a dizzying whirl in her brain. Sh