The girl shrinks from him, frightened even more by the wild light in his eyes than by his words, and as she shrinks he advances, contempt mingled with menace in his eyes.
‘You thought I should never find you,’ says he, with cruel slowness. ‘But mine you were from the beginning, and mine you are still.’
Ella makes a faint and trembling protest.
‘Deny it!’ cries he. ‘Deny it if you can! Your own mother left you to me—a mother who was ashamed to tell her real name. She left you—a waif, a stray—to my charity, and so, of my charity, I bought you through my wife. You are mine, I tell you. Hah! well you may hide your face! Child of infamy, now sunk in infamy!’
His strong, horrible face is working. The girl, as if petrified by fear, has fallen back into a garden-chair, and is sitting there cowering, her face hidden in her shaking hands.
‘So,’ continues the man in mocking accents, the very mockery of it betraying the intolerable love he had borne her in her sad past—a love now deadened, but still half alive, and quick with revengeful wrath, ‘you ran away from me, not so much from hatred of me, but for love of him.’
‘Of him?’ Ella lifts her haggard face at this.
‘Ay, girl, of him! The man who has dragged you down to this—who has brought you here to be a bird in his gilded cage. D’ye think to blind me still? I’ve followed you, I tell you, step by step. You didn’t reckon on my staying powers, perhaps. But I had sworn by the heaven above me’—lifting his hand, large and rough and powerful, to the sky—‘that I would have you, dead or alive!’ He pauses. ‘When you left me, I thought at first that I had been too harsh to you. But I was wrong: such as you require harshness.’ Again he grows silent. ‘You ran to him, then, because you loved him! Such as you love easily; has it occurred to you, however, to ask yourself how long he will love you?’
‘I—someone must have been telling you strange things. All this is impossible,’ says the girl, pressing her hands against her beating heart. ‘No one loves me—no one.’
‘And you do not love anyone? Answer that,’ says Moore.