How eagerly he listened to the thrilling voice! how ardently he gazed into the dreamy beautiful eyes! how breathlessly he kept the silence so hard to maintain!
"If I could use any further disguise with myself, Sir Laurence, if self-deception could have any further power over me, I might terminate this interview here, and tell you, and tell myself, that it should be forgotten. But I have done with self-deception."
"For God's sake, don't speak in that bitter tone!" Alsager said entreatingly; "spare me, if you will not spare yourself."
"No," she replied; "I will spare neither you nor myself. Why should I? The world has spared neither of us--will spare neither of us; only it will tell lies, and I will tell truths,--that's all."
Her colour was heightened, and her eyes were flashing now; but the pressure of her hand upon her bosom was steady.
"You have read my story aright: I know not by what art or science--but you have read it. If, as you say, you have an involuntary share, an unconscious responsibility in my heavy trial, it is a misfortune, which I put away from my thoughts; I hold you in no way accountable. My sorrow is my own; my delusion is over; my duty remains."
"Do you speak of duty to Sir Charles Mitford?" asked Alsager with a sneer.
"Yes," she said gently; "I do. Your tone is unworthy of you, Sir Laurence; but I pass it by; for it is the tone of a man of the world, to whom inclination is a law. Can my husband's faithlessness absolve me from fidelity? Is his sin any excuse for my defection from my duty? You say truly, I cannot love him now as I loved him when I did not know him as he is; but I can do my duty to him still--a hard duty, but imperative. The time will come when this woman will weary of him, of her vain and futile vengeance; and then--"
"Well, Lady Mitford, and then--?" asked Alsager in a cold hard voice.
She looked at him with eyes in which a holy calm had succeeded to her transient passion, and replied: