Mr. Berners seconded his wife in all hospitable attentions to their
beautiful young guest.
While they were all still seated at the table, a groom rapped at the
door and reported the stage-coach ready.
They all arose in a hurry, and began to make the last hasty preparations
for departure.
Mrs. Blondelle hurried into her own room, to have her luggage taken down
stairs to be put on the coach, and also to summon her nurse with the
child.
When Sybil Berners found herself for a moment alone with her husband,
she laid her hand upon his coat sleeve to stay him, in his haste, and
she inquired: "What do you think of her now?"
"I think, my darling Sybil, that you were right in your judgment of this
lady. And I agree with you perfectly. I think, my only love, that in
what you have done for this stranger, you have acted not only with the
goodness, but with the wisdom of an angel," replied Lyon Berners,
snatching her suddenly to his heart, and holding her closely there while
he pressed kiss after kiss upon her crimson lip; and murmured: "I must steal a kiss from these sweet lips when and wherever I can, my
own one, since we are not to be much alone together now."
And then he released her, and hurried off to put on his overcoat.
Sybil stood for a minute, smiling, where he had left her, and so happy
that she forgot she had to get ready to go. The pain was gone from her
heart, and the cloud from her brain.
And as yet, so little did she know of herself or others, that she could
not have told why the pain and the cloud ever came, or why they ever
went away.
As yet she did not know that her husband's admiring smiles given to a
rival beauty had really caused her nameless suffering; or that it was
his loving caresses, bestowed upon herself, that had soothed it.
In a word, Sybil Berners, the young bride, did not dream that the
bitter, bitter seed of JEALOUSY was germinating in her heart, to grow
and spread perhaps into a deadly upas of the soul, destroying all moral
life around it.