“But your promise!” he cries. “I have your promise, at all events. You cannot get out of that, nor do I intend to let you.”
“My promise!” she answers, and there is a scornful curve in the beautiful lips and a hard ring in the rich voice. “My promise! To a man who woos in prosperity and deserts in adversity; who sees an unprotected girl thrown upon the world, lonely and unfriended; and makes no sign. Who, when she departs to live among strangers in a far-off land, suffers her to go without so much as a word of farewell and encouragement; and that, too, the girl whom in palmier days he professed to love. No, Ralph Truscott, you have cancelled my promise by your own act, and, even if no other bar existed its conditions should never be yours.”
Truscott’s face is white with rage. He sees that his game is played out—that there is not a chance. He was prepared for some reproaches; in short, a good deal of unpleasantness, but not for such decision as this. His whole being quivers beneath a sense of overwhelming defeat, mortification, disappointment—nay, despair—and now, as he sees the prize slipping from his grasp, he is not sure whether he hates or loves her most.
“So the good, the pious, the saintly Lilian Strange can perjure herself in a way the most unregenerate would shrink from,” he sneers. “The privilege of godliness, I suppose. Oh, so a ‘bar’ does exist, does it? You should have told me that before.”
“It is impossible that you could not have known of it,” she replies, gently, but with quiet dignity. “That I am plighted—to another.”
His answer is a harsh, jeering laugh.
“Oh, I have heard some nonsensical story of the kind, but I knew it couldn’t be true. I thought you were only amusing yourself, in fact, knowing that anything serious was impossible, considering. So, of course, I didn’t believe it.”
“What do you mean?” says Lilian, outwardly calm, but with indignation and contempt in her voice, for there is something so maliciously significant in his tone that she is disturbed in spite of herself. “Don’t deal in hints and innuendoes. Speak out—if you dare.”
“If I dare? Well, then, I will speak out,” answers Truscott, stung to madness by her scornful look. He will bring her to her knees, he thinks. “This is what I mean,” dropping out his words deliberately. “I knew it couldn’t be true, because I knew it was impossible that Lilian Strange could be engaged to an ex-pirate, a murderer, and what, in her eyes, is probably much worse.”
“Do you know of whom you are speaking?”