She was the first, this time, to break the silence.

"Well?" she said, "you have asked, and I have answered. You have made me

hope something from all this, because you hoped something from it. What

have you to say now?"

The tone in which she spoke warned me that my influence over her was a

lost influence once more.

"We were to look at what happened on my birthday night, together," she

went on; "and we were then to understand each other. Have we done that?"

She waited pitilessly for my reply. In answering her I committed a

fatal error--I let the exasperating helplessness of my situation get the

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better of my self-control. Rashly and uselessly, I reproached her for

the silence which had kept me until that moment in ignorance of the

truth.

"If you had spoken when you ought to have spoken," I began; "if you had

done me the common justice to explain yourself----"

She broke in on me with a cry of fury. The few words I had said seemed

to have lashed her on the instant into a frenzy of rage.

"Explain myself!" she repeated. "Oh! is there another man like this in

the world? I spare him, when my heart is breaking; I screen him when my

own character is at stake; and HE--of all human beings, HE--turns on me

now, and tells me that I ought to have explained myself! After believing

in him as I did, after loving him as I did, after thinking of him by

day, and dreaming of him by night--he wonders I didn't charge him with

his disgrace the first time we met: 'My heart's darling, you are a

Thief! My hero whom I love and honour, you have crept into my room under

cover of the night, and stolen my Diamond!' That is what I ought to have

said. You villain, you mean, mean, mean villain, I would have lost fifty

diamonds, rather than see your face lying to me, as I see it lying now!"

I took up my hat. In mercy to HER--yes! I can honestly say it--in mercy

to HER, I turned away without a word, and opened the door by which I had

entered the room.

She followed, and snatched the door out of my hand; she closed it, and

pointed back to the place that I had left.

"No!" she said. "Not yet! It seems that I owe a justification of my

conduct to you. You shall stay and hear it. Or you shall stoop to the

lowest infamy of all, and force your way out."

It wrung my heart to see her; it wrung my heart to hear her. I answered

by a sign--it was all I could do--that I submitted myself to her will.




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