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CHAPTER V.

A SHREWD SCHEME.

An elegant apartment, one of a suite in a magnificent block such as are the pride of our great cities.

Softest carpets, of most exquisite pattern; curtains of richest lace; lambrequins of costly texture; richly-embroidered and velvet-covered sleepy-hollows and lounging chairs; nothing stiff, nothing that did not betoken abandonment to ease and pleasure; downy cushions; rarest pictures; loveliest statuettes; finest bronzes; delicate vases; magnificent, full length mirrors, a bookcase, itself a rare work of art, containing the best works of the best authors, all in the richest of bindings—nothing here that the most refined and cultivated taste could disapprove, and yet everything bespoke the sybarite, the voluptuary. A place wherein to forget that the world held aught save beauty; a place for luxurious revelry, and repose filled with lotus dreams.

Such was the bachelor abode of Lucian Davlin, as the glowing gas lights revealed it on the dark night of the arrival of this gentleman in the city.

Moving restlessly about, as one who was perfectly familiar with all this glowing richness, only because movement was a necessity to her; trailing her rich dress to and fro in an impatient promenade, and twisting recklessly meantime a delicate bit of lace and embroidery with plump, white fingers—a woman waited and watched for the coming of Lucian Davlin.

A woman, fair of face, hazel-eyed, sunny-haired, with a form too plump to be quite classical, yet graceful and prepossessing in the extreme. A very fair face, and a very wise one; the face of[55] a woman of the world, who knows it in all its phases; who is able, in her own peculiar manner, to guide her life bark successfully if not correctly, and who has little to acquire, in the way of experience, save the art of growing old gracefully and of dying with an acquitted conscience.

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No unsophisticated girl was Cora Weston, but a woman of eight-and-twenty; an adventuress by nature and by calling, 

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