‘Madam--nay, pardon me--my lady, bade me say that she would be in the morning-parlour. She has waited long.’ I turned the handle of the door, and was confronted by darkness. Yet was I not appalled, for I could understand Phyllida’s delicacy in wishing that our first meeting should be where her blushes might go unseen. I stole to the window, and sat on the praying-stool, with my eyes travelling through the gloom to her place. For the fourth time the sky blanched, and I saw her beside the table, resting her head on her hands, with her hair spread over shoulders and bosom in rippling swathes. At last, wounded by her indifference, I spoke, and destroyed a delightful hope that she would bid me welcome. ‘Phyllida!’ The old silence. I knew that she must be in one of those wonderful depths of feeling that she sometimes sounded, and felt proud of a woman of such strange charms. But what had swayed in the mistress troubled in the wife. ‘Are we not in perfect sympathy?’ I cried. Afraid of I know not what (the air in the room seemed turbulently struggling to pass through the closed windows), I opened the door and took one of the candles from a sconce in the hall. ‘Phyllida! Phyllida! Phyllida!’ I whispered, holding the light above my head. ‘I am here, sweet one, look at me!’ Still silence. Fiercely, perhaps, but still lovingly, I placed my hands beneath her forehead, to make her look upwards. At my touch a bundle of papers fell from her breast, and lay scattered on the floor. The clay bust I had seen on my marriage eve stood near: I thrust out my right hand angrily and broke it into fragments. The past was done with now! I had conquered! My victory made me exultant. Phyllida’s gossamer bonds were torn away for ever. As I drew back the hair and let the candlelight fall softly on my wife’s face she sighed heavily. ‘Dead love has slain my passion,’ she said. THE LOST MISTRESS PART I THE AUTHOR’S STUDY A half-dead _Spirëa Japonica_ stood on the writing-table; reared against the pot was a miniature, which, as the only beautiful thing in the room, and, moreover, as the work of John Ravil himself, merits a full description. Not even the most ardent flatterer of the sex would have sworn that the woman was less than eight-and-twenty. She was reclining on a luxurious, shawl-covered chair, with a background of pale roses and quaintly shapen mirrors. One hand held a frontal of pearls just taken from the light-brown hair; the other a letter which she was reading with some tenderness. Her face was fair, her eyes of a rich blue. Firm and lustrous shoulders peeped through the smooth white muslin of her gown. Mother Eve could not have peered her physical charm.