He was standing before her in his dazzling beauty, looking down upon her with an audacious assertion of invincible power of attraction and torture striking up through the brilliant softness of his eyes, hovering around the beautiful curves of his lips, and irradiating his whole countenance. Hagar turned away, veiling her eyes with her jewelled fingers, while she rested her head upon her hand. When she looked up again he was gone. He did not reappear that evening. It was the first evening they had spent apart. Unwilling to give him any new cause of offence she had remained in the drawing-room until their usual hour for retiring, when she at length sought her own chamber. He came up after a while with his usual gay and graceful nonchalance of manner, but without noticing her by word or look until she spoke to him; then he turned and flashed upon her a smile, beautiful even in its taunting scorn, that called the indignant blood in flames to her cheeks and brow, and she became silent. Thus days passed. He knew how to torture her. At table—at the time the embargo was taken off their conversation—ostensibly to deceive the servants, really to afford him an opportunity of tantalizing her by the fascination, he assumed his usual manner of affection. Thus weeks passed, until the time approached for the arrival of their visitors. One evening he came home and threw a letter in her lap; it was directed in the hand-writing of Sophie. _This_ seal was _not_ broken; she almost wished it had been; she opened it. It contained but a few lines from Sophie, informing her that their party would be at The Rialto the next morning. She held her letter out to her husband, but he, with a taunting smile and graceful gesture of the hand, declined her confidence. A sickening faintness came over her. An unwillingness, nay, a strong and growing repugnance to the idea of meeting any of her friends—for whom, indeed, she had never possessed any very strong affection—just at the time she was suffering mortal anguish by this estrangement from her husband—a dread of the approach of the fair and gentle girl—her rival from infancy—a fearful presentiment of falling still lower in his esteem by the side of the loving and love-winning Rosalia, these causes all conspired to tempt, to overpower her; she arose, and falling upon his shoulder, with her hair dropping all over him, with a bursting sob, exclaimed,