"I shall never be happy," said Kitty, withdrawing her hand from his, "never, never, never!" And then she burst into tears and rushed out of the room.
Vivian looked after her with a slightly puzzled expression, but did not attempt to call her back.
It was not a very favourable day for Hugo's suit, and he was received that afternoon in anything but a sunshiny mood by Miss Heron. For almost the first time she snubbed him unmercifully, but he had been treated with so much graciousness on all previous occasions that the snubs did not produce very much impression upon him. And, finding himself alone with her for a few minutes, he was rash enough to make the venture upon which he had set his heart, without considering whether he had chosen the best moment for the experiment or not. Accordingly, he failed. A few brief words passed between them, but the few were sufficient to convince Hugo Luttrell that he had never won Kitty Heron's heart. To his infinite surprise and mortification, she refused his offer of marriage most decidedly.
CHAPTER XLII.
A FALSE ALARM.
Angela's departure from Netherglen had already taken place. Hugo was not sorry that she was gone. Her gentle words and ways were a restraint upon him: he felt obliged to command himself in her presence. And self-command was becoming more and more a difficult task. What he wanted to say or to do presented itself to him with overmastering force: it seemed foolishly weak to give up, for the sake of a mere scruple of conscience, any design on which he had set his heart. And above all things in life he desired just now to win Kitty Heron for himself.
"She has deceived me," he thought, as he sat alone on the evening of the day on which she had refused to marry him. "She made me believe that she cared for me, the little witch, and then she deliberately threw me over. I suppose she wants to marry Vivian. I'll stop that scheme. I'll tell her something about Vivian which she does not know."
The fire before which he was sitting burnt up brightly, and threw a red glow on the dark panelling of the room, on the brocaded velvet of the old chair against which he leaned his handsome head, on the pale, but finely-chiselled, features of his face. The look of subtlety, of mingled passion and cruelty, was becoming engraved upon that face: in moments of repose its expression was evil and sinister—an expression which told its own tale of his life and thoughts. Once, in London, when he had incautiously given himself up in a public place to rejection upon his plans, an artist said to a friend as they passed him by: "That young fellow has got the very look I want for the fallen angel in my picture. There's a sort of malevolent beauty about his face which one doesn't often meet." Hugo heard the remark, and smoothed his brow, inwardly determining to control his facial muscles better. He did not wish to give people a bad impression of him. To look like a fallen angel was the last thing he desired. In society, therefore, he took pains to appear gentle and agreeable; but the hours of his solitude were stamping his face with ineradicable traces of the vicious habits, the thoughts of crime, the attempts to do evil, in which his life was passed.
The ominous look was strongly marked on his face as he sat by the fire that evening. It was not the firelight only that gave a strange glow to his dark eyes—they were unnaturally luminous, as the eyes of madmen sometimes are, and full of a painful restlessness. The old, dreamy, sensuous languor was seldom seen in their shadowy depths.