The signal, after a short respite, devoted to fruits, ices, &C.,
was made for the dancers, and William Edgerton rose. I noted his bow
to my wife, saw that he spoke, and necessarily concluded, that he
again solicited her to dance. Her lips moved--she bowed slightly--and
he again took his seat beside her. I inferred from this that she
declined to dance a second time. She was certainly more prudent
than himself. I assigned to prudence--to policy--on her part, what
might well have been placed to a nobler motive. I went further.
"She will not dance with him," said the busy fiend at my shoulder,
"for the very reason that she prefers a quiet seat beside him. In
the dance they mingle with others; they can not speak with so much
ease and safety. Now she has him all to herself."
I dashed away, forgetful, gloomily, from the knot by which I
had been encompassed. I passed into the adjoining room, which was
connected by folding doors, with that I left. The crowd necessarily
grouped itself around the dancers, and (sic) a window-jamb, I stood
absolutely forgetting where I was alone among the many--with my
eye stretching over the heads of the flying masses, to the remote
spot where my wife still sat with Edgerton. I was aroused from my
hateful dream by a slight touch upon my arm. I started with a painful
sense of my own weakness--with a natural dread that the secret misery
under which I labored was no longer a secret. I writhed under the
conviction that the cold, the sneering, and the worthless, were
making merry with my afflictions. I met the gaze of the bride--the
mistress of ceremonies--my wife's mother Mrs. Delaney, late Clifford.
I shuddered as I beheld her glance. I could not mistake the volume
of meaning in her smile--that wretched smile of her thin, withered
lips, brimful of malignant cunning, which said emphatically as such
smile could say:-"I see you on the rack; I know that you are writhing; and I enjoy
your tortures."
I started, as if to leave her, with a look of fell defiance,
roused, ready to burst forth into utterance, upon my own face. But
she gently detained my arm.
"You are troubled."
"No."
"Ah! but you are. Stop awhile. You will feel better."
"Thank you; but I feel very well."
"No, no, you do not. You can not deceive me. I know where the shoe
pinches; but what did you expect? Were you simple enough to imagine
that a woman would be true to her husband, who was false to her
own mother?"
"Fiend!" I muttered in her ear.
"Ha! ha! ha!" was the unmeasured response of the bel dame, loud
enough for the whole house to hear. I darted from her grasp, which
would have detained me still, made my way--how I know not--out of
the house, and found myself almost gasping for breath, in the open
air of the street.