Moths by Ouida — page 302: what you’re looking at

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

298 | MOTHS. her train she found a charming young man that she knew a lit- tle going the same way, and she gave him a seat in her coupe and flirted pleasantly all the way to Lyons. ay ‘‘What a mistake it is to take life aw grand serieux!” she thought. ‘‘Now, if poor Vere was not so tragic I think she might be the happiest woman in the world, still.” But then Vere could not have flirted with a chance young man in a coupe, and given hima yellow rose with the whisper of a half-promised rendezvous as they parted. These are the capabil- ities that make happy women. CHAPTER XXIV. In the house on the Gulf of Villafranca a heavy gloom reigned. Life ran the same course as usual, society came and went, peo- le laughed and talked, guests were gathered and were dispersed, ut there was a shadow in the house that even the ceremonies and frivolities.of daily custom could not altogether hide or dis- sipate. Sergius Zouroff was taciturn and quarrelsome, and it taxed all the resources of his sister’s tact and wit and worldly wisdom to repair the harm and cover the constraint produced by his captious and moody discourtesies. To his wife he said noth- Except the conventional phrases that society in the presence of servants necessitated, Zouroff preserved an unbroken silence to her; he was gloomy, but taciturn; now and then under his bent brows his eyes watched her furtively. This forbearance was only a lull in the storm, such a peace as came over the gulf beneath her windows after storm, when the waves sank for an hour at noon to rise in redoubled fury and send the breakers over the quay at sunrise. Asfor her the golden cup was now full, but was full with tears. Would she have had it empty? She was not sure. The echo of that one song seemed always on her ear; in the dreams of her troubled ‘sleep she murmured its words; the singer seemed to her transfigured, as to a woman bound in martyrdom, in days of old, seemed the saint with sword and palm that rode through fiery heats and living walls of steel to release her from the stake or wheel. ‘*The woman in Calvados called him the Angel Raphael,” she thought, with dim eyes. It was still midwinter when Sergius Zouroff, several weeks be- fore his usual time, abruptly left the villa of Villafranca and went with his wife and sister to his hotel in Paris. Zouroff had taken a bitter hatred to this place, where the only reproof he had ever endured, the only challenge he had ever received, had been cast at him publicly and in such wise that he could not resent or avenge it. When he drove through the streets of Monaco or the streets of Nice, he thought he saw on every face a laugh; when he was saluted by his numerous acquaintances, he heard in the simplest greeting a sound of ridicule ; when a song was hummed in the open air, he fancied it was the song of the Coup @’Or, In impatience and anger he tcok his household to Paris. \ ie | comicbooks > role (E(0) re.