k lithe movement of her supple figure, she nestled
softly against me, and turned up her radiant glowing face.

"Kiss me!" she said, and waited. As one in a whirling dream, I stooped
and kissed those false sweet lips! I would have more readily placed my
mouth upon that of a poisonous serpent! Yet that kiss roused a sort of
fury in me. I slipped my arms round her half-reclining figure, drew her
gently backward to the couch she had left, and sat down beside her,
still embracing her. "You really love me?" I asked almost fiercely.

"Yes!"

"And I am the first man whom you have really cared for?

"You are!"

"You never liked Ferrari?"

"Never!"

"Did he ever kiss you as I have done?"

"Not once!"

God! how the lies poured forth! a very cascade of them! and they were
all told with such an air of truth! I marveled at the ease and rapidity
with which they glided off this fair woman's tongue, feeling somewhat
the same sense of stupid astonishment a rustic exhibits when he sees
for the first time a conjurer drawing yards and yards of many-colored
ribbon out of his mouth. I took up the little hand on which the
wedding-ring _I_ had placed there was still worn, and quietly slipped
upon the slim finger a circlet of magnificent rose-brilliants. I had
long carried this trinket about with me in expectation of the moment
that had now come. She started from my arms with an exclamation of
delight.

"Oh, Cesare! how lovely! How good you are to me!"

And leaning toward me, she kissed me, then resting against my shoulder,
she held up her hand to admire the flash of the diamonds in the light.
Suddenly she said, with some anxiety in her tone:

"You will not tell Guido? not yet?"

"No," I answered; "I certainly will not tell him till he returns.
Otherwise he would leave Rome at once, and we do not want him back just
immediately, do we?" And I toyed with her rippling gold tresses half
mechanically, while I wondered within myself at the rapid success of my
scheme. She, in the meantime grew pensive and abstracted, and for a few
moments we were both silent. If she had known! I thought, if she could
have imagined that she was encircled by the arm of HER OWN HUSBAND, the
man whom she had duped and wronged, the poor fool she had mocked at and
despised, whose life had been an obstruction in her path, whose death
she had been glad of! Would she have smiled so sweetly? Would she have
kissed me then?

* * * * *