“_Free from her!_ Did he wish to be that? For a moment, when he remembered the glittering black eyes, the only eyes in the world which had power to make him quail, he half believed he did. On his return to Paris he had met the woman with the glittering eyes, which seemed to read his very soul, and ferret out his inmost thoughts. There had been a stormy scene, for Eugenie Arschinard was not one to brook a rival. She had compassed the ruin of poor Agatha of Normandy, whom, but for her, Haverleigh might have dealt fairly with, and made the marriage tie more than a mere farce, a horrid mockery. From his town-house in London, Eugenie had seen the young, fair-haired girl driving by and looking so eagerly at the place, and with her thorough knowledge of the world, she knew her to be an American, and guessed her to be some new flame whom he had lured from home, as the plaything of an hour. She never for a moment believed him married; he was not a marrying man; he dared not marry, bound as he was to her by the tie of honor, which, in her infidel heart, she held above the marriage vow. So when she met him in Paris by appointment, she charged him with his new fancy, demanding who and where she was, and he was a very coward in her presence, and dared not tell her the truth of that simple wedding among the New England hills, but suffered her to believe that Anna, like Agatha, was only his dupe, whom he could cast off at pleasure. Eugenie had no wish, at present, to be bound herself. She was true to Haverleigh, and she enjoyed to the full the luxuries with which he surrounded her, and in Paris, where such connections were common, she had her circle of friends, and reigned among them a queen because of Haverleigh’s name and the style in which she lived. By and by, when she was older, and ceased to attract admiration, she meant to marry him and so pass into a respectable old age, but just now her freedom suited her best, and she gave no sign of her real intentions for the future. But Haverleigh knew well that to confess he had a wife was to raise a storm he had not courage to meet, and so he told her the girl she had seen was a little wild rose from America, whom he had lifted from poverty and taken to Chateau d’Or. “‘You know I must have something to amuse me when I am at that dreary place, and Anna does as well as any one. A little washed-out, spiritless body of whom you need not be jealous.’