"So I see," he said, curtly, looking down at them. "It is almost a needless sacrifice, considering the hectacombs of choicer ones offered daily; you have flowers in abundance on your tables. But it is a woman's way to spoil and spare not. It does not matter, Miss Mildmay, flowers are but flowers and of little consequence. But there are other things higher in the scale which a woman gathers with reckless mood, to fling aside with wanton scorn. You ask me what they are?" he continued, standing stern and passionate before her. "I answer—hearts. 'Hearts are only hearts,' you may reply, but I tell you, Miss Mildmay, as one who speaks from sad experience, that a man's heart counts for something in the universe, and that a man's life is too high a thing to be wasted for a woman's toy."
He paused a moment.
Violet, who had stood silent and motionless, was silent still, but a burning flush of indignation flushed to her face.
He mistook it for conscious guilt and shame, and it maddened him.
"I speak harshly," he said. "But I pray you pardon me if for to-night, the last night I shall have the happiness of seeing you, I cast off the falsities of conventionality and speak as a man wronged and injured to the woman who has wronged and injured him. That I cannot heal the wound you have inflicted on me I am assured; but I may prevent you wounding others. You are young, Miss Mildmay, and there is a life before you in which you will have it in your power to save hearts or break them. I ask you to-night, here and now, to decide. I implore you to cast off the coquette and to be, what you are at heart, a woman true and noble! Be contented with the harm you have done, and lay aside the power of which my wasted life is the dire evidence——"
He paused, more for lack of breath than words and passion to speak them, and then Violet found her tongue.
"Sir!" she said, in that suppressed voice which tells of the heart's conflict. "Are you mad?"
"No!" he said, hoarsely, "but I have been. I am sane now, Miss Mildmay, sane and sorrowful. The glamour which you had cast over me I have driven off. I see you in your true light, and I rise from the trance which your beauty has wooed me to. Violet—for I will call you by that name once and for the last time—you taught me to love you but to scorn the slave who knelt at your feet. You made me a toy to be cast aside when the new one should come. It came, and your slave, your toy, was forgotten, or remembered only in your contempt. You the fair, and I——Well, being a man with a heart, I was foolish. But, oh, shame, that one so fair should be so false."
"False!" breathed Violet, her eyes flashing, her lips trembling with indignation and passionate agony.