“Oh, she was safe enough. Varley brought her down to the camp, and they gave her a reception that took the cake! What’s happened to her now, I don’t rightly know.”
Trafford leaned back and wiped his brow, and something like a groan escaped his lips. She was here, then!
[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
Trafford looked before him, his eyes fixed sternly, his lips drawn.
Yes, he had been right! She was here, and Norman was with her. His heart was torn with jealousy and rage—and love. For he loved her still. He had had time to think on the outward journey, and the more he thought, the more easy it had become for him to find excuses for Esmeralda. He thought of her, a wild, uncultivated girl, ignorant of the world into which she had been flung by a whim of capricious fortune.
During those weeks spent on the boundless sea in perpetual reverie, in endless brooding, he had learned to realize something of what she had suffered when she discovered that she had been married, as she supposed, for her money alone. He could understand why she had refused to believe that he had grown to love her, and how easily she had believed that he loved Ada Lancing.
He could make excuses for her, but none for Norman. Against Norman his heart surged with a bitter fury and thirst for vengeance.
The journey had tried him a great deal, and he was looking thinner than ever, and haggard and worn. He had avoided his fellow-passengers; had, indeed, scarcely spoken to them, and the weeks of solitude and painful self-communing had given his face an expression of sternness which indicated his grim resolution to follow Esmeralda and Norman, though it were to the other end of the world, and punish the latter.
He sat beside Johnson, the driver, with his arms folded tightly, his brows knit, and Johnson glanced at him now and again, and then whistled softly to his horses. He did not know what to make of him. A question trembled on Trafford’s lips, and at last he put it.