"Do you think that I am a stone," he said, violently, "that you tell me the story of your falseness so quietly, as if it were a tale that I should like to hear? Do you think that I feel nothing, or do you care so little what I feel? You had better have refused me outright at once than kept me dangling at your feet for a couple of years, only to throw me over at the last!"
"I have not thrown you over," she said, raising her blue-grey eyes steadily to his agitated face. "I wanted to tell you; that was all. If you like to marry me now, knowing the truth, you may do so."
"What!"
"I may have been false to you in heart," she said, the hot blood tinting her cheeks with carnation as she spoke, "but I will not break my word."
"And what did your lover say to that?" he asked, roughly, as he stood before her. "Did he not say that you were as false to him as you were to me? Did he not say that he would come back again and again, and force you to be true, at least, to him? For that is what I should have done in his place."
"Then," Elizabeth said, with a touch of antagonism in her tones, "he was nobler than you."
"Oh, no doubt," said Percival, tossing aside his head. "No doubt he is a finer fellow in every way. Am I to have the pleasure of making his acquaintance?"
His scorn, his intolerance, were rousing her spirit at last. She spoke firmly, with a new light in her eyes, a new self-possession in her manner.
"You are unjust, Percival. I think that you do not understand what I mean to tell you. He accepted my decision, and I shall never see him again. I thought at first that I would not tell you, but let our engagement go on quietly; and then again I thought that it would be unfair to you not to tell you the whole truth. I leave it to you to say what we should do. I have no love to give you—but you knew that from the first. The difference now is that I—I love another."
Her voice sank almost to a whisper as she uttered the last few words, and she covered her face with her hands. Percival's brow cleared a little; the irony disappeared from his lips, the flash of scorn from his eye. He advanced to her side, and stood looking down at her for several minutes before he attempted any answer to her speech.