E-text prepared by Al Haines Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 22928-h.htm or 22928-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/2/9/2/22928/22928-h/22928-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/2/9/2/22928/22928-h.zip) SACRIFICE by STEPHEN FRENCH WHITMAN Author of "Predestined," Etc. [Frontispiece: "COME CLOSER, I WANT TO LOOK AT YOU."] D. Appleton and Company New York :: 1922 :: London Copyright, 1922, by D. Appleton and Company Copyright, 1921-1922, by The Ridgway Company SACRIFICE PART ONE CHAPTER I Lilla Delliver's parents, killed in a railway accident, left their child a legacy other than the fortune that the New York newspapers mentioned in the obituaries. The mother had been tall, blonde, rather wildly handsome, with the look of one of those neurotic queens who suppress under a proud manner many psychic disturbances. Painfully fastidious in her tastes, she had avoided every unnecessary contact with mediocrity. Reclining on a couch in her boudoir, she read French novels saturated with an exquisite sophistication. Then, letting the book slip from her fingers, she gazed into space, as listless as a lady immured in a seraglio on the Bosphorous. At night, if the opera was _Tristan_, she went down to her limousine with the furtive eagerness of a woman escaping from monotony into a secret world. She drove home with feverish cheeks, and when her husband spoke to her she gave him the blank stare of a somnambulist. After a busy social season she was liable to melancholia. She sat by the window in a charming negligee, paler than a camellia, hardly turning her head when, at twilight, her child was led in to kiss her. Recovering, somehow, she traveled. On those journeys every possible hardship was neutralized by wealth. Yet even for her the sea could not always be calm, or the skies of the Midi and the Riviera blue. In Venice, at midnight, the soft, hoarse cries of the gondoliers made her toss fretfully on her canopied bed. In Switzerland, as dawn flushed the snow peaks, awakened by the virile voices of the guides, she started up from her pillow in a daze of resentment and perverse antipathy. She calmed herself by listening to the sermons of swamis in yellow robes, and by sitting in cathedrals with her eyes fixed upon the splendor of the altar. Wherever they traveled, her husband went about inquiring for new physicians--"specialists in neurasthenia." But then he usually felt the need of a physician's services also.