“You can dare to say it, trapped and detected in the very act? There is no error—none?—and I am she, I suppose, whom you expected to find revealed under this token? O! shameless! But your dissembling does not deceive me—instant and ready as it proves itself. Go seek her, sir, the vile party to your iniquity—she is doubtless somewhere in the garden; and bear with you the scorn and detestation of the insulted wife you thought vainly to overreach, and who now denounces and repudiates you for evermore.”
She made as if to leave him, but again turned, a quivering smile on her lips—
“And bear with you, Philip Stanhope, this reflection, which I know will gall you above any sense of guilt expressed: it was you broke the long silence between us, and it was I that trapped you into doing so. If you can feel any humiliation greater than your own discovered wickedness, it will lie in that, I know.”
“Stop!” cried his Highness, as she was going. The truth had dawned upon him through that torrent of invective. Not Kit was he, in her assumption, but her own recreant husband. The discovery was illuminating—and, indirectly, gratifying, inasmuch as it seemed to dispose, so far as she was concerned, of that hypothetical intriguer. And yet was it possible she was only manœuvring to justify her own frailty through her husband’s example? “Where are you going?” he said.
She answered in one straitened monosyllable: “Home.”
And that reassured and decided him. It was a cruel ruse, perhaps; but he saw no other hope, in her excited state, of detaining and reasoning with her. Doubtless, when the inevitable discovery ensued, the emotional reaction consequent on it would prove his forgiver and abetter.
He had to hurry to keep pace with her. “Nay,” he whispered in her ear, “believe me when I say there was no error. Could I have failed, think you, to recognize my Kate, though in a subtler disguise than this? Trust a husband’s eyes and senses, sweetheart. Come, be reasonable; we cannot talk here. Turn with me, and let us seek a spot more private to our confidences in the solitudes beyond.”
Indeed, as they advanced, it was to make themselves more and more “the cynosure of neighbouring eyes.” But the wife was not to be moved. She was deaf and blind now with a passion she could not surmount. As he persisted in accompanying her, she stopped suddenly, and stamped her little foot on the grass.
“Will you cease to importune me,” she said, “and go?”
“Only turn and come away,” he entreated, “and I will explain everything.”