His Other Wife: A Novel — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

>» ‘THE WIDOW'S CONFESSION. Warren stepped forward to meet the slender, delicate, and intensely aristocratic woman, who approached him feebly, as if scarcely able to sustain herself in walking. He saw at a glance that she was an invalid, in the last stage of some fatal malady, but still fair as a dream. She took the nearest chair, and held out a frail hand that was bloodless and wasted. For a moment she gasped painfully without trying to speak; the exertion of crossing the house had exhausted her. Warren clasped the pallid fingers, and asked, with anxious concern ; ‘‘Can I get you anything, madam?” She smiled, shook her head, and pointed to a seat beside her, ‘‘T am a little more ill than usual this evening, and moving has unnerved me. I shall be over it presently. Give me some air, please.” She glanced toward: the closed blinds of a French win- dow that gave upon the piazza.. Warren opened it, and a stream of cool, vapor-laden air from the lake flowed in. Mrs. Morgan opened her mouth to breathe in a long draught of it. | The sky was still aglow, and as its radiance of rose and saffron tints fell over her face, the woman looked unearthly as a disembodied spirit. Perhaps the late vision of Leda’s superb. health and gorgeous coloring had sharpened his perceptions painfully to the contrast which her mother’s transparent fragility comicbooks.¢o 475}