“No, I have never thought of the matter.”
“Then you are truly indifferent?”
“I am, indeed!”
“You have no regard for my feeling—no gratitude for the love that I have lavished upon you so long. There is a cause for this, and that cause is your love for George Irving.”
He looked at me with malicious scrutiny, but I had expected this, and my cheek remained cool as if he had passed an ordinary compliment.
“Inscrutable child,” he muttered, “will nothing reach you?”
“You are right,” I answered, without heeding his muttered comment. “It is my love for George Irving that makes me look upon all that you express as a wrong done to him, a mockery of the true feeling that lives in my heart, as rich wine fills a cup to the brim, leaving no space for a drop less pure than itself.”
Oh, how my soul shrunk from the smile which he turned upon me.
“Can you, vain girl—can you, for a moment, think that he loves you?—you whom his uncle abandons and his mother denounces?”
The blood burned in my cheeks and temples hotly enough now, but I answered proudly,