To Win the Love He Sought

Lord St. Maurice was in a good humor with himself and the entire world that night. He had spent nearly the whole of the day with the woman he loved, and whom he was shortly to marry, and with the prospect of another such day on the morrow, even his temporary exile from paradise was not a very severe trial. He was an ardent suitor, and deeply in love, but an hour or two alone with a case of excellent cigars, with delightful thoughts to keep him company, the softest air in Europe to breathe, and one of the most picturesque sights to look upon, could scarcely be esteemed a hardship. Above him, among the woods, twinkled the bright lights of the Villa Fiolesse which he had just quitted, and below was the gay little Marina, still dotted about with groups of men in soft hats and light clothes, and bright-eyed, laughing women, whose musical voices rang out on the still night air with strange distinctness.

Through the clinging magnolia bushes and rhododendron shrubs he pushed his way downward, the red end of his cigar shining out like a signal light in the semi-purple darkness. Every now and then he stopped to take a breath of air perfumed by a clump of hyacinth, or some star-shaped flower which had yielded up its sweetness to the softly-falling night. Now and then, too, he took a lover's look at the stars, and downward to the softly-heaving bosom of the Mediterranean. All these things seemed to mean so much more to him now! Adrienne had changed the world, and he was looking out upon it with different eyes. Sentiment, which before he had scoffed at a little, as became a sturdy young Briton but lately escaped from public school and college, had suddenly become for him something akin to a holy thing. He was almost a poet that night -- he who had scarcely read a line of what the world calls poetry since his school days. There was a man whom he had hated all his life.