Then he heard a laugh, the laugh that had made him writhe yesterday, and she stood before him. For a minute she stood and looked at him with a mocking smile that scarcely harmonized with a certain angry light in her black eyes, and a hard tightening of her lips.
“Well,” she said, eying him up and down. “So you were too afraid to stop away, were you? By Heaven! you were right. Do you know what I would have done if you hadn’t come?”
“Well, I’m here, am I not?” he exclaimed, timidly. “What are you going to do, Bella? Don’t—don’t be too hard upon me——” and he moistened his lips.
“Hard upon you!” she echoed. “As if anybody could be too hard upon you. You! Do you know what I meant to do if you hadn’t turned up? I’ll tell you.” She came a step nearer. “I meant to go up to the house—what’s it called, your father-in-law’s grand place?” (no words would convey an idea of the diabolical mockery of her tone)—“your father-in-law’s place, and ask for you. I don’t think they’d have refused me, when I’d told them who and what I was to you.”
“For God’s sake, don’t go on like this, Bella,” he said, nervously, his eyes half-raised imploringly. “I’m—I’m at your mercy, I know. If—if you had turned up before yesterday, if it had only been the day before, I wouldn’t have done this; but—but it was too late then. I—I couldn’t break it off.”
“You’re a nice villain, ain’t you?” she sneered. “I wonder what they’d do to you if I up and told them all, eh?”
“God knows,” he said, hoarsely. “But you won’t do that, for your own sake.”
“For my own sake,” she repeated, advancing upon him threateningly. “Why should I care? I wouldn’t mind. Don’t you dare me! If you only knew what a little would make me do it, how I’m simply dying for the fun that it would make, you wouldn’t talk like that, you scoundrel!”
“Hush, hush,” he said, looking round nervously. “You’ll—you’ll have somebody hear you. The place is full of people; some one may come this way any moment——”
“And find Mr. Bartley Bradstone has left his newly-made bride to meet a strange young woman in his father-in-law’s park.” She leaned against the tree and laughed with malicious enjoyment. “What a row there’d be! What a prime, glorious row! Lord! I’d like to be in it. As for you”—her tone changed—“you deserve anything. Nothing’s too bad for you. You to go and make a victim of that girl! What harm had she done you, I should like to know?”