“Mrs. Floyd-Rosney asked me,” she said, laying all the skeins together in her right hand while she looked up with bright interest, “if you had ever told me of the contents of the letter she wrote to you some months ago.”
“And what did you answer?” asked Randal, breaking the awkward silence.
“Why, of course I told her that you had never mentioned the letter,” replied Hildegarde, with a flash of surprise. “I told her the truth.”
“You did! Why, you amaze me!” exclaimed Randal, with a touch of his old gayety, and with the laugh that rippled around the circle the incident passed.
Yet this incident put him on his guard. He had long since lost every trace of the sentiment he had once felt for this woman. From the moment he had received his rejection, years ago, he had realized that he had been mistaken from the first in her nature. With many men the contemplation of the magnitude of the temptation, the splendor of the opportunity as Floyd-Rosney’s wife, might have served to condone in a degree her defection. Not so with Randal Ducie. He had a very honest self-respect. He had been trained at his mother’s knee to reverence the high ideals of life. To him, Love was a sacred thing, Marriage was the ordinance of God, and a mercenary motive a profanation. He had been poignantly wounded in the disappointment, humiliated, in some sort, yet he looked upon the discovery that she was vulnerable to this specious lure of gain as an escape, and he set all the strong will of his stanchly endowed nature to recover from the influence she had exerted in his life. Now, so long afterward, when he had not only reason to condemn and resent her part in his own past, but to detest the very sight of her, the sound of the name she bore, he could not imagine how she could be the victim of the obsession that she was aught to him but a hateful living lie, a presentment of avarice. He wondered at the persuasion of a woman, perceived by him only in this instance, but often noticed elsewhere by the observant in such matters, as to the unlimited power of her attractions. She can never believe no ember burns amidst the ashes of a former attachment, dulled by time perhaps, covered from sight, but smouldering still, and with fresh fuel ready to flame forth anew. He could not understand on what was based her conviction of the permanence of his attachment. On her true faith to bind them together till death?—it had been tested and found wanting. On her gifts of intellect?—the supposition was an absurdity; she was indubitably a bright and a cultivated woman, but Randal had been educated too definitely in the masculine American methods to think of sitting at the feet of any woman. On her beauty?—where was the traditional delicacy of the feminine perceptions! Did she imagine him a Turk at heart? Her beauty might attract—it could never hold. In the old days of his fond affection if she had been visited by some disfiguring, defacing affliction she would have been the same to him, equally dear, and but that she herself had stripped off the mask and proclaimed the disguise that had befooled him she would have been the lady of his heart, the cherished treasure of his life to the day of his death.
Now he could but wish that she would withhold her withering hand from such poor values as she and hers had left him in life. He did not understand her latest demonstration. But for Hildegarde’s pellucid candor he might never have dreamed of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s covert interest in a proposition made to him by the senior partner of a firm of prominent jewelers, looking to the purchase of the diamond necklace found among the jewels at Duciehurst, now lying in a safety deposit vault. Ducie curtly refused to entertain an offer. Then he as curtly asked:
“But why should you think I would wish to sell it?”
Mr. Dazzle was visibly embarrassed, but still rational.
“The idea was suggested to me, as the stones are of great—well—ahem—considerable value, and you have no ladies in your family.”
“Not at present,” said Randal, stiffly.