“Ah, you admit it,” she said, sadly as if she had hoped, even against hope, that he would deny it, even in the face of the truth. “I will not tell you how I learned it. But it is the truth; you can not deny it!”
She put her hand to her lips for a moment, as if to steady them, for they were quivering.
“It was not me, but—but the money you wanted,” she went on. “All the time you have—perhaps, hated me; have been laughing at me even while you—you have been saying—saying—”
Her voice broke. She remembered—it flashed upon her at that instant—how few loving, really loving, speeches he had made to her.
“I ought to have known,” she faltered. “But I did not. How should I? brought up in a diggers’ camp. And there was no one like you at Three Star, no one who thought of such things. I was just ignorant, and—and believed you.”
“My God!” he murmured, under his breath. He understood all she was feeling; and he shared her agony of shame and humiliation. Another man might have turned to her and lied to her, fluently declaring that he had loved her from the first; but Trafford could not do that. It would have seemed to him as if he were insulting her and mocking her misery.
“I believed you,” she went on, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “I thought you—you cared for me—”
“Esmeralda!” broke from him; then as he met her sorrowful gaze, he stopped and turned his head away.
“When you took me down to Belfayre, and they were all so good to me, I didn’t understand, I didn’t guess the truth. And the duke talked as if he were rich, as if money—money was not even thought of. And you—you seemed”—her voice broke—“as if you could not do or even think anything mean and— It is just that; I didn’t understand.”
Her bosom heaved, and her eyes, dry and burning, gazed vacantly at the sky, now reddening with the setting sun.