“Miss O'Donnel!” exclaimed Monica. “I wonder you can speak of her to me.”
Her voice quivered with angry scorn, yet my heart leaped with joy at the words which confirmed Pilar's suspicions and my hopes.
“She's as loyally your friend as I am loyally your lover,” I assured her. “Now listen. There are things which you must hear; and if when you've heard them you ask me to take you to your mother and Carmona, I'll obey instantly.” Then, without giving her time to cut me short, I began to talk of the letter I had written at Manzanares, and how I sent it, and what it had said. “Did you get it?” I asked.
“No such letter as that. It was a very different one—a horrible letter. Oh, Ramón! if it were true; if you had been true! If you could have gone on loving me!” She broke into sobbing, and hid her face between her hands.
“Don't dare to doubt that I did, and always will. Tell me what the letter said?” I pulled her hands down, too roughly perhaps, and held them fast in mine.
She tried to check her sobs. “I could show you the letter if there were a light. Since that day I've carried it with me, so that [pg 259]I could look at it sometimes, and have strength to hate you if my heart failed.”
“My own darling—mine again,” I soothed her. “It's been a horrible plot. If that letter was not full of love and longing for you, it was forged; no doubt after the handwriting of the one I really sent.”
“You mean my mother—would do a thing like that?”
“She might have justified it by telling herself that the end sanctified the means.”
“I know—she was ready to do almost anything to turn me from you,” Monica admitted, leaning against me so confidingly that all I had suffered was forgotten. “I couldn't have believed this of her; but—she did tell me the night before Manzanares that at Toledo she heard you calling Pilar O'Donnel, ‘darling.’ ‘Young Mr. O'Donnel seems very fond of his sister,’ mother said, looking straight at me, though she seemed to speak innocently. ‘I heard him call her “darling girl.” ’ You can imagine how I felt! But I hoped she was mistaken, or that she'd invented it to make me unhappy; so I wouldn't let myself be very unhappy, only a little distressed. Because, you know, Miss O'Donnel is awfully pretty and perfectly fascinating. Mother said, the night we were at Manzanares, that she was one of those girls whom most men fall irresistibly in love with; and—and I loved you so much, I couldn't help being jealous.”