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The very next night but one after Lucio's strange interview with Mavis Clare, the thunderbolt destined to wreck my life and humiliate me to the dust fell with appalling suddenness. No warning given !—it came at a moment when I had dared to deem myself happy. All that day,—the last day I was ever to know of pride or self-gratulation,—I had enjoyed life to the full; it was a day too in which Sibyl had seemed transformed to a sweeter gentler woman than I had hitherto known her,—when all her attractions of beauty and manner were apparently put forth to captivate and enthrall me as though she were yet to be wooed and won. Or,—did she mean to bewitch and subjugate Lucio? Of this I never thought,— never dreamed:—I only saw in my wife an enchantress of the most voluptuous and delicate loveline
