"What do you say? Is this a jest? If so, it is in rather bad taste, don't you think?"
He looked at her steadily.
"Have I the appearance of a man who jests?" he breathed.
Her face paled.
"If it isn't a jest, what is it?" she demanded, querulously. "Why do you come at this time of night and say absurd things like—like that?"
"Is it so absurd, do you think? Consider. Violet, have you been dreaming all these months? You should know me well enough to feel that I am not a mere straw to be idly blown hither and thither, not a man likely to waste his life doing service for no requital. Let me take you back to the past. Do you remember the days and months and years I waited on you like a slave? Do you think it was done for nothing, with no hope of reward?"
His eyes shone with fierce determination, his whole manner proclaimed eloquently the dominant idea which had actuated him through the past, which was now so near its fulfillment.
"I never deceived you. Think! remember! Is it so hard to go back? I suppose it must be so! You are now the Countess of Ferrers, Blair's wife; you have obtained all you craved for, and, like all those who rise upon the shoulders or the hearts of some faithful friend and slave, you forget the aid by which alone you rose!"
He drew a little nearer, and stood upright before her, his face made almost handsome by the intensity of its expression.
"Violet, do you remember the day I knelt at your feet and poured out the love with which my heart was burning? I was no schoolboy, nor mere fortune-hunter. I loved you with an all-absorbing passion; I should have loved you if you had been a poor girl selling flowers in the streets, and I would have knelt to you if you had been such an one as humbly as I knelt to Violet Graham, the wealthy heiress, with all the world at her beck and nod! And you!—how did you treat me? Look back! You scarcely deigned to listen, and when at last you consented to waste a few minutes in listening to my prayer—ah! and what a prayer it was; the cry of a man begging for his life!—you answered me with a few half-contemptuous words, a smile wholly scornful, and a haughty request that I would never again so far forget myself. Forget myself! Violet, as I left you that day, I swore that if I lived I would win you; that every gift nature had given me, every talent I could acquire, should be pressed into the service of my oath, and that sooner or later I would come to you—not kneeling, as the humble suppliant, the slave craving for a boon at the hand of a tyrant, but as one having the power to command and exact that which he wanted."