"To-night, before another hour, this awful imposture must be confessed, and reparation offered. I sinned against Minnie, but not premeditatedly. You deceived me. You made me believe her the foul, guilty thing you wished her. You intercepted her letters, you never let me know that I had a child neglected and forsaken; and, father, God may forgive you, but I never can. My proud, lovely Minnie! My own wife!"
Cuthbert buried his face in his hands, and his strong frame shook as he pictured what might have been, contrasting it with the hideous reality of his loveless and miserable marriage with the banker's daughter, who threatened him with social disgrace.
During that drive General Laurance felt that he was approaching some offended and avenging Fury, that he was drifting down to ruin, powerless to lift his hand and stay even for an instant the fatal descent; that he was gradually petrifying, and things seemed vague and intangible.
When they reached the hotel, they were ushered into the salon already brilliantly lighted as if in expectation of their arrival. Cuthbert paced the floor; his father sank into a chair, resting his hands on the top of his cane.
After a little while, a silk curtain at the lower end of the room was lifted, and Mrs. Orme came slowly forward. How her lustrous eyes gleamed as she stood in the centre of the apartment, scorn, triumph, hate, all struggling for mastery in her lovely face.
"Gentlemen, you have read the handwriting on the wall. Do you come for defiance, or capitulation?"
General Laurance lifted his head, but instantly dropped it on his bosom; he seemed to have aged suddenly, prematurely. Cuthbert advanced, stood close beside the woman whose gaze intensified as he drew near her, and said brokenly:
"Minnie, I come merely to exonerate myself before God and man. Heaven is my witness, that I never knew I had a child in America until to-night, that until to-night I believed you were in California living as the wife of that base villain Peterson, who wrote announcing himself your accepted lover. From the day I kissed you good-bye at the cottage, I never received a line, a word, a message from you. When I doubted my father's and Peterson's statements concerning you, and wrote two letters, one to the President of the college, one to a resident professor, seeking some information of your whereabouts, in order at least to visit you once more, when I became twenty-one, both answered me that you had forfeited your fair name, had been forsaken by your grandmother, and had gone away from the village accompanied by Peterson, who was regarded as your favoured lover. I ceased to doubt, I believed you false. I knew no better until to-night. Father, my honour demands that the truth be spoken at last. Will you corroborate my statement?"
Pale and proud, he stood erect, and she saw that a consciousness of rectitude at least in purpose, sustained him.
"Mrs. Orme——" began General Laurance.