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The Judgment House by Gilbert Parker
page 5 of 561 (00%)

She was not oblivious of the music. Her heart beat faster because of
it; and a temperament adjustable to every mood and turn of human
feeling was answering to the poignancy of the opera; yet her youth,
child-likeness, and natural spontaneity were controlled by an elate
consciousness. She was responsive to the passionate harmony; but she
was also acutely sensitive to the bold yet deferential appeal to her
emotions of the dark, distinguished, bearded man at her side, with the
brown eyes and the Grecian profile, whose years spent in the Foreign
Office and at embassies on the Continent had given him a tact and an
insinuating address peculiarly alluring to her sex. She was well aware
of Ian Stafford's ambitions, and had come to the point where she
delighted in them, and had thought of sharing in them, "for weal or
for woe"; but she would probably have resented the suggestion that his
comparative poverty was weighed against her natural inclinations and
his real and honest passion. For she had her ambitions, too; and when
she had scanned the royal box that night, she had felt that something
only little less than a diadem would really satisfy her.

Then it was that she had turned meditatively towards another occupant
of her box, who sat beside her pretty stepmother--a big, bronzed,
clean-shaven, strong-faced man of about the same age as Ian Stafford
of the Foreign Office, who had brought him that night at her
request. Ian had called him, "my South African nabob," in tribute to
the millions he had made with Cecil Rhodes and others at Kimberley and
on the Rand. At first sight of the forceful and rather ungainly form
she had inwardly contrasted it with the figure of Ian Stafford and
that other spring-time figure of a man at the end of the first row in
the stalls, towards which the prima donna had flashed one trusting,
happy glance, and with which she herself had been familiar since her
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