He took the pretty, scented flowers from the box, where loving hands had so gently laid them, and crushed them into a shapeless, dead heap.
"That will never lie on your golden hair, my Lady Studleigh," he said.
She made no effort to save the pretty wreath; his furious violence dismayed her and made her mute. She saw him stamp on the orange blossoms that should on the morrow have crowned her; she saw them lie crushed, torn, destroyed at his feet, and she looked on in a kind of trance. To her it was like a wild, weird, dark dream.
Then he took the costly wedding-dress, with its rich trimmings of white lace, and he laughed as he tore it asunder, flinging it under his feet; then pausing to look on his work of destruction with a smile.
"There will be no wedding to-morrow, fair lady," he said. "Ah, Dora, why have you driven me mad? why have you unmanned me? why have you made me ashamed of myself?"
There was a strange glitter in her eyes, and a strange expression on her face.
"I did not mean to be so violent; you have driven me to it. Not that I regret destroying your wedding-dress: I would do it over again a hundred times; but I am sorry to have frightened you."
"You could not frighten me," she replied.
And if ever calm scorn was expressed by any human voice, it was by hers.
There came a lull in the storm. He stood looking partly at the ruin he had caused, partly at her. She seemed, strange to say, almost to have forgotten him. She stood where the light of the lamp fell on her disheveled hair and flushed face.