CHAPTER IX.
ONE WEEK AFTER.
On that eventful night of wind and rain upon which the Reverend Raymond Rashleigh performed that mysterious midnight marriage, Mr.Carl Walraven paced alone his stately library, lost in thought--painful thought; for his dark brows were contracted, and the Grecian heads in the brackets around him had no severer lines than those about his mouth.
While he paces up and down, up and down, like some restless ghost, the library door opens, and his wife, magnificently arrayed, with jewels in her raven hair, a sparkling fan dangling from her wrist, an odor of rich perfume following her, appears before him like a picture in a frame.
She is superbly handsome in that rose-colored opera-cloak, and she knows it, and is smiling graciously; but the swarth frown on her husband's face only grows blacker as he looks at her.
"You are going, then ?" said Mr.Carl Walraven.
"Going ?" Mrs.Walraven arches her black eyebrows in pretty surprise at the word.

"Of course, my dear.

I would not miss 'Robert le Diable' and the charming new tenor for worlds." "Nor would you obey your husband for worlds, madame.

I expressly desired you to stay at home." "I know it, my love.

Should be happy to oblige you, but in this case it is simply impossible." "Have you no regard for the opinion of the world ?" "Every regard, my dear." "What do you suppose society will say to see you at the opera, dressed like a queen, while we are all mourning poor Mollie's loss ?" "Society will say, if society has common sense, that Mrs.Walraven scorns to play hypocrite.