Colonel Carlyle soon misses his heart's fair queen from the ball-room, and immediately the whole enchanting scene becomes a desert in his love-lorn eyes. He glances hither and thither; he wanders disconsolately around, yet no flitting glimpse of his snow-maiden rewards his eager eyes. She has vanished as completely from his sight as if a sunbeam had shone down upon and dissolved her into a mist.
"Have you seen Bonnibel anywhere?" he inquires of Felise, meeting her on her partner's arm as he wandered around.
Felise looks up with a low, malicious laugh.
"Bonnibel?" she says. "Oh, yes; she and Byron Penn have been down on the beach this half hour in the moonlight, composing sonnets."
Her partner laughs and hurries her on, leaving the anxious old husband standing in the floor like one dazed. A dozen people standing around have heard the question and its answer. They nod and wink at each other, for Colonel Carlyle's patent jealousy has begun to make him a laughing stock. After a moment he recollects himself and turns away. People wonder if he will go out and confront the sentimental pair, and a few couples, on curiosity bent, stroll out to watch his proceedings. They are rewarded directly, for he comes out and takes his way down the shore.
Felise's assertion of a half an hour is merely a pleasant fiction. It has not been ten minutes since she left the house on the arm of the young poet. They are standing on the beach looking out at the glorious sea, and the young man whose soul is so deeply imbued with poetry that he can think and speak of nothing else, has been telling her what a sweet poem is "Lucille," Owen Meredith's latest. He repeats a few lines, and the girl inclines her head and tries to be attentive.
"O, being of beauty and bliss! seen and known
In the depths of my heart, and possessed there alone,
My days know thee not, and my lips name thee never,
Thy place in my poor life is vacant forever,
We have met, we have parted, no more is recorded
In my annals on earth."
The pretty lines have a more attentive listener than Bonnibel. Her husband has come up softly and unnoticed. He sees the graceful head graciously inclined, hears the lines that Byron Penn has, unconsciously to himself, made the vehicle for expressing his own sentiments, and his heart quakes with fury. He strides before them, white and stern.
"Mrs. Carlyle," he says, in low, stern accents, "will you come with me?"
The young wife lifts her drooping head with a start and sees him standing before her, wan, white and haggard, quite a different man from the enraptured lover who had kissed and praised her but a little while ago.
"I—oh, dear me—has anything happened, Colonel Carlyle? Are you ill?" she falters, in her innocent unconsciousness.
"Will you come with me?" he repeats, grinding his teeth in a fury.
"Certainly," she says, thinking that something dreadful must have happened surely, and simply saying, "You will excuse me, Mr. Penn," she bows and turns away on her husband's arm.
The handsome young fellow looks after them blankly.
"Upon my word," he exclaims, "what a furious, uncalled-for outbreak of jealousy! So that's what it is to be an old man's darling, is it? Truly an enviable position for such a peerless angel."
He throws himself down on the beach, to the detriment of his immaculate evening costume, and resigns himself to some rather melancholy musings.
Meanwhile Bonnibel, as she walks away, again asks, with sweet unconsciousness:
"Has anything happened, Colonel Carlyle?"
"Let us go to your private parlor; I will tell you there," he answers, coldly.
Inside that safe retreat they confront each other in momentary silence, Bonnibel anxious, troubled, and totally unconscious, Colonel Carlyle pale with anger and wild, unreasoning jealousy, his brain on fire with contending passions that have been seething there ever since Felise's consummate art had been employed to torture him this evening.
"Now you will tell me?" she inquires, standing before him with loosely-clasped hands, the fleecy drapery falling from her shoulders, the fairest vision his eyes ever rested upon.
"Bonnibel, you surely do not pretend to be ignorant that you have given me cause for offense?" he exclaims, hoarsely.
Her blue eyes dilate; she retreats a step with genuine surprise depicted on her face. Then she remembered her promise about waltzing.
"Surely, there is some misunderstanding," she answers, slowly. "I assure you, sir, that I have not waltzed any more since you asked me not to do so."
"You have done worse, much worse!" he exclaims, passionately, "and your affectation of innocence must certainly be feigned. No woman in her senses could be oblivious to the fact that your open flirtation with that silly rhymester, Byron Penn, is simply scandalous."
In his excitement he characterizes her offense in terms more forcible than true. She is dumb with astonishment for a moment, then she walks straight up to him, a blaze of color rushing over her face and neck, while her eyes flash lightning scorn upon him.
"This to me!" she exclaims, her girlish voice ringing with passion and resentment. "Such an accusation to Harry Vere's daughter! Oh! for shame! How dare you!"
"You provoked it yourself," he answers, retreating before her, for her little hands were clenched wildly as if she would strike him down to earth; "I gave you my honored name to wear—a name as proud as your father's—and you have dragged it through the mire of a moonlight flirtation with a dandy, an idiot."
"It is false," she answers, proudly, "I never flirted in my life, I should not know how to do it. And there was no harm in my short walk down to the shore with Mr. Penn. No one could make harm of it except a man blinded by jealousy!"
A glimmer of the truth had begun to dawn upon her. It angered him bitterly to know that she had detected his weakness.
"I have been blinded by many things," he answers, furiously. "I was blinded by your beautiful face before I married you, and could not see that you had never received the proper training and education to fit you for the position to which I elevated you. My eyes have been opened by your recent conduct, and I find you simply an unformed child, utterly ignorant how to maintain your dignity as my wife!"
Word for word he is going over the specious sophistries of Felise, but he is utterly unconscious of the fact. He has been merely a pliant tool in her artful hands, but he believes that he has found out all these facts for himself, and he asserts them with a perfect conviction of truth.
For Bonnibel stands listening in stunned silence to his vehement rhodomontade. She has walked away from him a little way, and stands clinging to the back of a chair, as if to save herself from falling. The angry flush has died out of her face, and she looks marble-cold, and white even to her lips. As he pauses, she speaks in low, resentful accents:
"Colonel Carlyle, you are the first man who has ever offered me an insult!"
"An insult!" he exclaims. "Do you call the truth an insult? You talk like a child and act like a child, Bonnibel. I see no other resource before me than to put you at school and keep you there until you learn the necessary amenities of social life which your uncle's blind indulgence aided and abetted you in ignoring."
"Send me—a married woman—to school—like a child!" she says, staring at him blankly.
"Why not? You are quite young enough yet," he answers, moodily. "Two years at a convent school in Paris would give you the training and finish you lack at present."
"I assure you, sir, that my education has not been so totally neglected as your words imply," she answers from the depths of the arm-chair into which she has wearily fallen. "My Uncle Francis, though he loved me too well to send me away from him to school, always provided me with competent governesses, and if my training does not do them credit it is my own fault, not his; so I beg that you will not needlessly reflect on his memory."
He was silent a moment, pacing restlessly up and down the floor. An unconscious pathos in her words had stung him into reflection. "My Uncle Francis loved me too well to send me away from him," has touched a responsive chord in his own heart. Her uncle had loved her like that, yet he, her husband, bound to her by the dearest tie on earth, could talk of sending her away from him like a naughty child that, having disobeyed, must be punished for its fault.
"Could I do it?" he asked himself, suddenly. "I love her as my own life, though her childish follies drive me mad with jealousy. I am growing old—could I lose her out of my life two precious years when my span of existence may be so short? No, no, fool that I was to threaten her so; I will retract it if I can without compromising my dignity."
He paused before her and said abruptly:
"I understand from your words then, Bonnibel, that you refuse your consent to my proposed plan?"
To his surprise and confusion she lifted her head with a proud, stag-like motion, and said icily:
"Au contraire, sir, I think well of it, and fully agree with you that I need more training and polish to fit me for the exalted position I occupy as your wife!"
The fine, delicate irony of her tone could not fail to strike him keenly.
He tried to ignore it as he said in a voice that betrayed nothing of his conflicting emotions:
"My proposed course meets with your full approval, then, madam?"
She inclines her head with stately grace.
"I cannot think of anything at present, Colonel Carlyle, that would please me so well as a few years at a Parisian school such as you mentioned."
"She is only too glad to have an opportunity of separating herself from me," he thinks, bitterly; but aloud he answers coldly, "So be it; I shall be happy to meet your wishes."