“There was none reposed in him,” she answered. “It is you—you who have been deceived. I never spoke to Lieutenant Mason nor saw him after we quitted the priory.”
Mr. Aylwinne now looked utterly bewildered. He longed to believe her, yet what she told him was so completely at variance with all he had hitherto fancied to be true, that his mind was thoroughly confused.
In agitation far greater than her own, he exclaimed:
“For Heaven’s sake, Florence, do not palter with me! If a natural womanly shame at the unmerited disgrace that fell upon you has hitherto sealed your lips, to me you may surely speak openly! Or if I ask what gives you pain, bid me be silent, and I will faithfully obey.”
“Yet answer me this,” she cried: “Have you actually believed me united to Lieutenant Mason—believed that I came to your house a deserted wife, hiding her shame beneath a name she had no longer a right to bear?”
Mr. Aylwinne did not reply. All his deeply rooted convictions shaken by her indignant earnestness, he stood gazing at her in troubled silence.
With rising anger, Florence passionately exclaimed:
“If I have ever felt disgraced in my own sight it is now that I find you have thought me capable of such infamous concealments! What! you have been regarding me all these months as the discarded victim of a villain, and imagined that under such circumstances I could permit you to woo me?”
He drew his hand across his brow.
“Mason is dead, and you are free. Did I not carefully guard against a look or word that should fright you hence, while another had the shadow of a claim upon you? I can scarcely command my thoughts at this moment; yet surely I have not been mistaken in supposing that you acknowledged a barrier between us, and acceded to my wish that the wrongs you received at Mason’s hands should be never adverted to by either of us?”