"You are fastidious truly, and your sense of honor supreme," she sneered.
"Beauty there was not," he continued, without regarding her rejoinder, "in any remarkable degree. I could have borne its absence with common patience, but absolute disfigurement, deformity, such as you assure me those burns have left behind them, is too dreadful! Had not Dr. Pemberton bared her arm in bleeding, as he did, I should never have known of it at all probably until too late. That one mark was suggestive."
"You attach too much consequence to mere externals, Claude," said Evelyn, coldly. "I trust such fastidious notions may be laid at rest before your marriage, or poor Miriam, with her warm, affectionate, and unsuspicious nature will be the sufferer. I pity her fate, sincerely."
"No, Evelyn, you wrong me there; I respect and esteem her far too much ever to wound her feelings. Against this I shall carefully guard. My bargain would be broken, otherwise. It is a clear case of barter and sale, you see. One's honor is concerned in keeping such an obligation. I shall never be ungrateful."
"You have European ideas, you tell me," she said, bitterly; "is this one of them?"
"It is, and the least among them, perhaps; yet it is, nevertheless, hard to overcome positive repulsion."
There was a pause now, during which I could count every throb of my heart, and throat, and temples—my whole frame was transfigured into an anvil, on which a thousand tiny hammers seemed to ring. Yet I could not move, nor speak, nor weep—no wretchedness was ever more supreme than this cataleptic seizure. Evelyn was the first to break the transient silence.
"Your path is a plain one, Claude Bainrothe; fulfill your contract, sealed with gold, and bear patiently your selected lot."
"Evelyn, one word—let it be sincere: do you hate and scorn me? Answer me as you would speak to your own soul."
"No, Claude, no, yet the blow was hard to bear—struck, too, as you must reflect, so suddenly! Only the day before abandonment, remember, you had made protestations of such undying constancy. Your conduct was surely inconstant, at least."