"You would . . . ?" she murmured faintly. "You thought that I . . . ? Oh! . . ." she gasped in the infinity of her pain.
But like the wounded beast when first it sees its own hurt, so did this man now—gentle, artistic, fastidious though he was—suddenly feel every cruel instinct of the primitive savage rise within him at the thought of the great wrong which he believed this woman had done him. All the latent tenderness in his heart was crushed. Manlike, he only longed now to make her suffer one tithe of the agony which he had endured because of her treachery. He thought that she had played with him and fooled him in sheer wantonness, and he wished to crush her pride, her youth, her gaiety as she had broken his life and his honour.
He despised her for what she had done, and longed to let her see the full measure of his contempt. Glad that he had succeeded in hurting her, he tried to turn the blade within the wound.
"Nay, you need have no fear, lady," he said, "the wars in France will soon claim my presence, and the world will be quite ready to forgive to the Duchess of Wessex the sins of Lady Ursula Glynde, especially after a chance French arrow had made her free again."
But it was the very magnitude of the insult which restored to Ursula her self-possession, nor would she let him see now how deeply she was wounded. With her self-control, her dignity also returned to her, and she said with a coldness at least equal to his own—
"The world has naught to forgive me, as you know best, my lord."
"Nay! but I know that I must be grateful. By the mass! the story was well concocted, and I must congratulate you, fair Bacchante!" He laughed bitterly, ironically. "Your honour threatened! . . . my timely interference! . . . and I who feared for the moment you might make full confession."
"Confession of what? . . . you are mad, my lord."
She had drawn nearer to him, and for the first time since the commencement of this terrible tragedy of errors, one corner of that veil of impenetrable mystery was lifted from before her eyes. She did not make even a remote guess at the truth as yet, but vaguely she became aware that she and this man whom she loved were at some deadly cross-purposes, were playing at some horrible hide-and-seek, wherein they were staking their life and happiness. There was something in his look which suddenly revealed to that unerring feminine instinct in her that his bitterness, his cruelty, his insults, had their rise in a heart overburdened with a hopeless passion. He, the most perfect gentleman, most elegant courtier of his time, did not even try to curb his tongue, when speaking to her, who had never wronged him, and who had nobly saved his life, when he must know that she had done it out of disinterested self-sacrifice.
Did he know that?