Despite the pleasure she had taken in the visit to Doucet's, there was a plaintive touch in the heart of Carmelita de Cordoba as the limousine bore her through the busy streets, now streaked with the first shadows of twilight, in the direction of the Ritz, and her lovely face bore a trace of discontent. This vague dissatisfaction of life and particularly her approaching marriage had been increasing within her as the day of her departure from Paris grew nearer.
Carmelita had not troubled to conceal from her intimate friends the fact that she did not love the man to whom she was affianced. How could she?
Don Pablo Mendoza, her fiancé, was over fifty, her father's closest friend, their neighbor, and, like the de Cordobas, the possessor of considerable wealth and its South American concomitant, power. Since the earliest memories of her girlhood her life had been more or less intermingled with his. Her first recollection of him was when he was thirty—handsome, swarthy, a disfiguring dueling scar
