Summary
In the ochre dusk of a Nevada outpost, Sir Edward Pelham—a baronet whose bloodline reeks of Earl Grey and imperial ledgers—hauls his half-Russian, half-wandering-soul daughter Nadine across the Atlantic in a velvet-lined panic. He dreads the Romany chord that thrums inside her pulse; he would rather graft her onto the withered vine of a cousin’s title than watch her ankles jingle with Gypsy coins. Enter Bayard Delavel, a taciturn railway engineer whose only aristocracy is the slide-rule in his breast pocket and the sulphuric tang of dynamite on his cuffs. A diamondback rattler strikes; Delavel’s jack-knife slashes; the girl’s calf leaks venom and myth in equal measure. Pelham storms the cabin, finds his barefoot daughter in a stranger’s blankets, and—because Victorian scandal is more combustible than desert nitre—forces a shotgun union. What follows is not honeymoon but mirage: Delavel, convinced Nadine’s heart is still betrothed to a ghost-cousin, decamps eastward to petition for divorce, while Nadine, corseted into Washington salons, prepares to auction herself to Hopper, a millionaire whose surname is as bland as his money is loud. On the night her engagement ball drips chandeliers like frozen champagne, she collides with Delavel amid the marble colonnades; the waltz stalls, the gaslights stutter, and the lovers re-knot a fate that was never truly severed.
Synopsis
Sir Edward Pelham, married to a Russian Gypsy, fears that his daughter will follow in her mother's footsteps and arranges a marriage with her cousin, whom she does not love. During a trip to Nevada with her father, she meets engineer Bayard Delavel, who saves her life when she is bitten by a snake; when her father finds her with Bayard in his cabin, he forces them to marry. Believing that Nadine does not love him, Delavel leaves her and prepares to sue for divorce. In Washington Nadine is reconciled with her father and agrees to marry Hopper, a millionaire; she meets Delavel on the night of her engagement ball, however, and the lovers are reunited.
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