"Well," he said, stung by her scorn, but carrying it off insolently, "in the words of the illustrious Mr. Tweed, 'What are you going to do about it?'"
Had he been man enough—perhaps even had he been old enough—he would have thought of the danger to her in all this tumult of feeling and calmed her by a candid meeting of the question she had forced upon him. But he maddened her with his flippant manner and contemptuous words. And a change was going on in him too. Under his light demeanor his anger was rising. There was bad blood in Victor De Jarnette—false, cowardly blood—and it was beginning to assert itself.
"I am going to do this," she said, in a low, concentrated tone. "I demand to know what this woman is to you. I have a right to know."
"And know you shall," he answered, meeting her gaze with defiant eyes, in which every evil passion had burst into flame. "Since I am to be badgered and run to earth in my own home, know that she is a woman I love—and shall love. One that I shall go to when—and where—and as I please. The De Jarnettes are not ruled by their women!"
"Then choose between us," she said, with whitening lips, "for I swear to you by the living God I will be all or nothing to the man that calls me wife!"
They stood facing each other,—her features white and drawn, his inflamed with passion. Then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, a frightened sense of her own helplessness, perhaps, or possibly a surging back of her old love—for women are strange beings—she came closer to him and stretched out her hands.
"Victor! Oh, Victor!"
He thrust her aside and went out. The door clanged behind him, waking echoes in the silent house, and Margaret, suddenly strengthless, dropped in a heap on the floor, her face buried in the couch. She sat there long with hopeless eyes staring into the blackness of the morrow, saying now and then brokenly, "Father!... Father!"
White now with anger, furious at Margaret's discovery of his falseness, and yet more furious at the necessity which her ultimatum laid upon him to amend his ways or lose his wife; unholy passion for her rival hot within him, and the vengeful blood of his race coursing tumultuously through his veins, Victor De Jarnette strode down Massachusetts Avenue almost a madman. Not for him was the soft beauty of the night—the breath of flowers, the light of stars, the play of summer breezes among the leaves. His heart was closed to the sweet influences of the Pleiades. That heart, alas! out of which are the issues of life had become a seething cauldron of fierce passions.