neath her satin gown, and wished her to bend
her fair face to his lips that were craving a kiss.

Marianne took his face between her soft hands, and looking at him with
an odd smile, tender and ironical at once, at this big simpleton who was
completely dominated by her mocking tenderness, she said:

"You are just the same Sulpice!"--as she spoke, she bent over him
engagingly, and laughed merrily while he kissed her.

IV

Jose de Rosas thought himself much more the master of himself than he
actually was.

This energetic man, firm as a very fine steel blade, had hoped to find
that in living at a distance from Marianne, he might forget her or at
least strengthen himself against her influence. He found on his return
that he was, however, more seduced by her than before, his heart was
wholly filled and gnawed by the distracting image of the pretty girl. He
had borne away with him to London, as everywhere in fact, the puzzling
smile, the sparkling glance of this woman's gray eyes that ceaselessly
appeared to him at his bedside, and beside him, like some phantom.

The phantom of a living creature whose kiss still burned his lips like a
live coal. A phantom that he could clasp in his arms, carry away and
possess. All the virgin sentiments of this man whose life had been the
half-savage one of a trapper, a savant or a wanderer, turned toward
Marianne as to an incarnated hope, a living, palpitating chimera.

Jose felt certain that if he returned to Paris it was all over with him,
and that he was giving his life to that woman. But he returned. His
fight against himself over, the first visit he made, once again, was to
the den where he knew well that he could discover Marianne's
whereabouts. He went to her as he might walk to a gulf. Under his cold
demeanor of a Castilian of former days, he was intensely passionate and
would neither reflect nor resist. He had experienced that delightful
sensation of impulse when, upon the rapids at the other end of the
globe, the river carried into a whirlpool his almost engulfed boat. He
would doubtless have been stupefied had he found Marianne installed in a
fashionable little mansion. She promised herself to explain that to him
when she next saw him while informing him, there and then, that she had
taken up her abode there. A mere whim: Mademoiselle Vanda having gone
away, the idea had attracted her of sleeping within a courtesan's
curtains. "I will tell him that this transient lu