"Will you?" said Hester, with a sneer. "Your will and your power are both likely to be taxed. Mrs. Streightley timed her departure well; she had got all there was to be had out of her great marriage. Robert Streightley is a ruined man!"
Gordon Frere turned a shade paler as he said, quietly,
"Is this true, Hester? are you sure?"
"It is perfectly true, and I am perfectly sure," she replied.
"Then how do you know it?"
She laughed a low quiet laugh.
"Ah, that is my secret," she said.
"So be it," he replied. "And now, understand me. You have taunted me with my love for Katharine Guyon, and her rejection of me. I avow both. I loved her dearly, and I believed she loved me. I asked her to be my wife, and she rejected me. I don't question her motives; I only know that I suffered the keenest misery in consequence. But I say to you, as I would say to any other, who dared to accuse me of sullying the purity of Katharine Streightley by an unauthorised word or look or wish, that it is a base and dastardly lie. She has been to me, since her marriage, as distant as a star,--an object of admiration and reverence indeed, but no more, as she never can be less. Now--I would do any thing in the world to prove to her, and to her husband, that I am the warmest of her friends and the most devoted of her servants.--And now, Hester, one word of ourselves. You are not a foolish woman, speaking random words and swayed by every gust of temper. I presume you have not so spoken to-night; and I give all you have said its weight of sober seriousness. I think you would have done better to have left these words unsaid; but remember this, they can never be unsaid now, and the fruit they are likely to bear will be no sweeter to your taste than to mine. I am going to see Yeldham in the morning, and will breakfast with him. Good-night."
So he left her, and she let him go without a word. The time crept on, and still she sat beside the fire, with the flickering light upon her jewels and her velvet dress, with her dark eyes stern and fixed, and her hands clasped and motionless. It was not until a servant came to ask if the lights might be put out, that she roused herself, and went upstairs to her room. There she found her maid, shivering and yawning in the protracted weariness of waiting.
She dismissed the woman at once, who went out of the room, not without having looked sharply at her mistress. Hester caught the look, and when she was alone, went to her dressing-table, and gazed fixedly at the reflection of her face in the glass.