It was a certificate of the marriage of Blair, Lord Leyton—it set forth the long string of his Christian names—and Lucy Snowe, at the church of St. Jude, Paddington, on March the twelfth of the present year.
She tried to grasp the paper, but her fingers refused to close on it, and fell limp and useless at her side, and she stood glaring down at the crouching figure at her feet as at some monster.
"Are you convinced?" wailed the girl. "Do you believe me now? Oh, how do you think I should have the heart to tell you such a story? And now—what will you do? Oh, give him back to me! I don't utter a word of reproach against you! No! I know, I feel that he has deceived you—Ah!" she broke out as if she had been stung. "Don't tell me he has married you! If he has, if he has dared to, I'll punish him! I'll send him to penal servitude. I'll——"
Margaret's swooning senses caught the threat, and she held out her hand. It was her turn to plead.
"No, no!" she panted almost inaudibly, "he—he has not! He is nothing to me! You—you shall have him back! Oh, Heaven! Oh, Heaven!" and, with a cry that rang through the room, she fell forward on her face.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
Lottie Belvoir looked down at the prostrate figure of Margaret with a pallor that made the carefully-applied paint on her face look yellow by contrast.
For a minute or two she felt frightened and had an idea of calling for help. Lottie was not altogether a bad girl; indeed, the persons who are either altogether bad or altogether good do not exist in real life, but only in the pages of some novels.
She had been brought up in a hard school, in which each has to struggle for itself, and where each knows that without doubt the devil will take the hindmost.