nd the magnificent figure
grew tense for a moment as she smiled with a look of inquiry.

"I'm lost in wonder at the riotous glory of your capacity for sensuous
joy. I could imagine Juno on the heights of Olympus executing such a
dream of mad luxury, but I could never have conceived of this, here, if
I had not seen it. And yet, now that I see you in the setting, I'm sure
you were made for it. The whole scheme is harmonious--it scares me----"

"Scares you?" she repeated with quick displeasure.

"Yes," he went on, jokingly. "It almost reconciles me to being a
bachelor."

A look of pain swept the expressive face and he was sorry he had said
it. The joke seemed out of harmony with her mood. She had taken herself
seriously in the creation of this room, and had spent on it a round
million. The effect it had produced on the man's mind was anything but
flippant. He dared not tell how deeply he was moved, how every desire
had awakened into fierce, cruel longing as the subtle scheme of
sensuous dreaming had unfolded itself before his eyes. He began to
wonder whether there were really any complexity or any mystery at all
about her, whether she were not very simple and very elemental.

The picture she made standing in this wonderful room was one that never
faded from his memory. The poise of her superb form; the fires that
smouldered in the depths of her eyes; the tenderness with which her
senses seemed to drink in the daring luxury; the smile that played
about her lips, joyous, sensuous, cruel!

In vivid flashes he saw in her shining face the record of it all--the
naked African hunters, crawling through forest jungles, stalking and
bringing down in pools of blood the huge beasts who paid their tribute
to her beauty; the army of toiling artists who bent their aching backs
for days and weeks and months and years, carving the pictures in those
white shining surfaces to please her fancy; the bowed figures of the
weavers in Lyons and Brussels, these deft fingers working into
matchless form the costly fabrics to please her eye and soothe the
touch of her fingers as she drew back her curtains of purple and gold
to let in the morning sunlight!

He wondered vaguely what such a woman, clothed with such power, would
do if suddenly thwarted in a wish on which her heart was set?

And then it swept over him that she was no strange Egyptian princess,
no sorceress of the Nile, no fairy of poet's fancy, but just the girl
he had loved and l