Moths by Ouida — page 115: what you’re looking at

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

and the glow and the noise and the mirth seemed to him tedious and stupid. ‘* Decidedly that opera tires me,” he said to himslf, and thought that his weariness came from slaying Tybalt — and himself on the boards of the great theater. He told his friends and adorers with petulance to let him be still, he wanted to sleep, and the dawn was very cold. He went home to his gor- geous rooms in a gorgeous hotel, and lit his cigar and felt tired. he chambers were strewn with. bouquets, wreaths, presents, notes; and amidst the htter was a great gold vase, a fresh gift from the emperor, with its two rileivi, telling the two stories of Orpheus and of Amphion. But Correze did not look twice atit. He looked instead at a ~ French journal, which he had thrown on his chair when his servant had roused him at seven that evening, saying that it was the hour to drive to the theater. He had crushed the paper in his hand then and thrown it down; he took it up now, and look- ed again ina corner of it in which there was announced the ap- proaching marriage of Prince Zouroff. ‘*To give her to that brute!” he murmured, as he read it over once more. ‘‘ Mothers were better and kinder in the days of Moloch!” Then he crushed the journal up again, and flung it into the wood-fire burning in the gilded tower of the stove. It was not slaying Tybalt that had tired him that night. ‘¢ What is the child to me?” he said to himself, as he threw himself on his bed. ‘‘She never could have been anything, and rN ales fy i Yet the scent of the hothouse bouquets and the forced flowers seemed sickly'to him; he remembered the smell of the little rose plucked from the sweet-brier hedge on the cliff above the sea. The following noon he left Vienna for Moscow, where he had an engagement for twenty nights previous to his engagement at St. Petersburg for the first week of the Russian New Year. From Moscow he wrote to Lady Dolly. When the letter reached Lady Dolly it made her cry; it gave her a crise des nerfs, When she read what he wrote she turned pale and shuddered a little; but she burnt what he wrote; that was all. She shivered a little whenever she thought of that letter for days and weeks afterward; but it changed her purpose im no way, and she never for one moment thought of acting upon it. ‘‘T shall not answer him,” she said to herself. ‘‘ He will think I have never had it, and I shall send him a faire part like any- body else. He will say nothing when the marriage 1s over. Absurd as it is, Correze is a gentleman; I suppose that comes from his living so much among us.” ' Among the many gifts that were sent to swell the magnificence of the Zouroff bridal, there was one that came anonymously, and of which no one know the donor. It gave rise to many conjectures and ‘much comment, for there was not even the name of the jeweler that had made it. It was an opal necklace of exauisite workmanship and great value, and, as its medallion, there hung a single rose diamond cut as a star; beneath the star (e(@) (€(@) Al G 00 ES