Her gliding step, her glittering eyes, her fragrant but fiery breath as she approached made her resemble a serpent which uncoils itself to spring.
He shuddered in spite of himself.
Then he rose, and exclaimed, in a voice of thunder—“Marriage! And you can give utterance to that word as applied to our two selves?”
“Ah!” she cried, as she clenched her hands, and recoiled a few steps, “What is the cause of this outburst?”
“You have told me your history,” returned he, recovering his sang froid, and lighting a fresh cigar at the dying ashes of his first. “Permit me to relate to you the history of another young lady, for I feel assured that you will find it wondrously interesting. Indeed, it is altogether so romantic that it would appear to many persons quite incredible, but it is correct in every particular—so I have been given to understand. The tale is so instructive that it becomes an actual warning to all who might by chance be acquainted with its heroine. Her name was Margaret Oughton.”
The woman uttered a horrible cry. Algernon Sutherland closed his eyes and allowed the smoke to curl voluptuously from between his lips.
“Her name was Margaret Oughton. She was the daughter of a cotton operative. When she left her native town she met with a gentleman in London who was struck with her beauty. He feared to marry her; the reason for this—or rather one of the reasons—was that he was old, and she was very young. Poor man, he was wondrously smitten with the fair young creature, who told him, with embraces, that she loved him. He was vain, and therefore believed her. He believed those embraces to be pure, which were as meretricious as those of a fille-de-joie.
“He married her, and before a month had passed away he found that she had a lover. He ought not to have been astonished at this, and the probability is that he was brought to look upon it as a very natural sequence; anyway he forgave her. In return this angelic young wife robbed him of every farthing she could lay her hands on and eloped with her lover.”
“I was his tool—a mere puppet in his hands. I was at his mercy; he made me do it. I had no power to refuse,” cried Laura Stanbridge.
“Liar and murderess! That man, your partner in vice, your accomplice in crime, was discovered lying in the high road, his face covered with frightful spots, and all the signs of death by poisoning within his frame. Therefore, my dear Lorry, since I have no ambition to play Duncan to your Lady Macbeth, or to have my tea sugared with arsenic any morning that you happened to sit down to breakfast in a bad temper, I politely decline your kind offer.”