she laid her prayerbook on the table and with a glance in the mirror near by, began pulling off her gloves in the slow and graceful fashion eminently in keeping with her every movement.
It was as if an atmosphere of worldliness had settled down upon this room sanctified a moment before by the utterances of a pure and noble love. Mr. Sylvester looked uneasy, while Bertram searched in vain for something to say.
“I seem to have brought a blight,” she suddenly murmured in an easy tone somewhat at variance with the glance of half veiled suspicion which she darted from under her heavy lids, at first one and then the other of the two gentlemen before her. “No, I will not sit,” she added as her husband offered her a chair. “I am tired almost to death and would retire immediately, but I interrupted you I believe in the utterance of some wise saying about matrimony. It is an interesting subject and I have a notion to hear what one so well qualified to speak in regard to it—” and here she made a slow, half lazy courtesy to her husband with a look that might mean anything from coquetry to defiance—“has to say to a young man like Mr. Mandeville.”
Edward Sylvester who was regarded as an autocrat among men, and who certainly was an acknowledged leader in any company he chose to enter, bowed his head before this anomalous glance with a gesture of something like submission.
“One is not called upon to repeat every inadvertent phrase he may utter,” said he. “Bertram was consulting me upon certain topics and—”
“You answered him in your own brilliant style,” she concluded. “What did you say?” she asked in another moment in a low unmoved tone which the final act of smoothing out her gloves on the table with hands delicate as white rose leaves but firm as marble, did not either hasten or retard.