His Other Wife: A Novel — page 128: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

120 SPINNING A WEB. Though he had turned coldly from her, and was appa- rently engrossed in conversation with Mrs. Dalton—a gay little society woman—Warren’s glance reverted furtively to the beautiful face that had lain for one delirious moment on his breast. | Perhaps it was the recollection of that moment that called a fervid flush to his brow, as he withdrew his eyes from Leda’s averted face to answer some commonplace re- mark of Mrs. Dalton. Or was it the undertone of keen suffering that he divined through the smiling mask that Leda wore for the world’s eyes? He fancied to-night, for the first time since the day he saluted her as Mathew Croft’s bride, that the soft outlines of her beauty had sharpened a trifle, and that the feverish light in her eyes seemed more like the glow of fierce pain than the radiance of pleasure. Then her tone had been thrilled through with a keen agony when she uttered that passionate reference to the past. With the sensitive chivalry of a large-hearted man, to whom the sins and the sorrows cf womanhood ever appeal with irresistible pathos, Warren began to feel that perhaps he had judged Leda too hastily, and that it might be, as she intimated, that some invincible force of which he had not guessed may have been urged upon the girl to drive her to this hasty marriage. In the midst of such disturbing fancies as these, he succeeded in sustaining a disjointed conversation with those immediately around him until all the formalities Comichoo Ss. 3 (E(0)