Dancing still, encircled by my arms, and gliding along like a sea-nymph on moonlighted foam, she sighed restlessly.

“Tell me what you mean, amor mio,” she asked, in the tenderest tone in the world.

Ah, God! that tender seductive cadence of her voice, how well I knew it!—­how often had it lured away my strength, as the fabled siren’s song had been wont to wreck the listening mariner.

“I mean that you have changed me, sweetest!” I whispered, in fierce, hurried accents.  “I have seemed old—­for you to-night I will be young again—­for you my chilled slow blood shall again be hot and quick as lava—­for you my long-buried past shall rise in all its pristine vigor; for you I will be a lover, such as perhaps no woman ever had or ever will have again!”

She heard, and nestled closer to me in the dance.  My words pleased her.  Next to her worship of wealth her delight was to arouse the passions of men.  She was very panther-like in her nature—­her first tendency was to devour, her next to gambol with any animal she met, though her sleek, swift playfulness might mean death.  She was by no means exceptional in this; there are many women like her.

As the music of the waltz grew slower and slower, dropping down to a sweet and persuasive conclusion, I led my wife to her fauteuil, and resigned her to the care of a distinguished Roman prince who was her next partner.  Then, unobserved, I slipped out to make inquiries concerning Vincenzo.  He had gone; one of the waiters at the hotel, a friend of his, had accompanied him and seen him into the train for Avellino.  He had looked in at the ball-room before leaving, and had watched me stand up to dance with my wife, then “with tears in his eyes”—­so said the vivacious little waiter who had just returned from the station—­he had started without daring to wish me good-bye.

I heard this information of course with an apparent kindly indifference, but in my heart I felt a sudden vacancy, a drear, strange loneliness.  With my faithful servant near me I had felt conscious of the presence of a friend, for friend he was in his own humble, unobtrusive fashion; but now I was alone—­alone in a loneliness beyond all conceivable comparison—­alone to do my work, without prevention or detection.  I felt, as it were, isolated from humanity, set apart with my victim on some dim point of time, from which the rest of the world receded, where the searching eye of the Creator alone could behold me.  Only she and I and God—­these three were all that existed for me in the universe; between these three must justice be fulfilled.

Musingly, with downcast eyes, I returned to the ball-room.  At the door a young girl faced me—­she was the only daughter of a great Neapolitan house.  Dressed in pure white, as all such maidens are, with a crown of snow-drops on her dusky hair, and her dimpled face lighted with laughter, she looked the very embodiment of early spring.  She addressed me somewhat timidly, yet with all a child’s frankness.