Then she dressed herself in her seal jacket and hat and went out, and walked up and down under the cold starlight of the Christmas night until she was so weary that she could walk no longer.
Finally she returned to the house and retired to bed without again seeing her guardian.
The terrible mental trials of the days and weeks that followed, surpass all powers of description.
The deep, devoted, constant love of Marcel de Crespigney for the beautiful child he called his ward, had been fanned by opposition and fear of disappointment into an intense and insane passion. He lost all patience, all self-control; he could no longer refrain from pleading with her or caressing her, even when he saw that his words and actions inflicted tortures unendurable upon the gentle and sensitive soul.
And Gloria, she suffered with a subtle anguish, difficult to analyze, impossible to describe. As his niece and child, she loved and pitied her uncle, with all her young, compassionate heart, even as she had loved and pitied him from her earliest infancy up to present girlhood. But with her Christian faith and training she believed his suit to her to be most sinful and sacrilegious, and she shrank from it in horror and loathing unspeakable and indescribable. Yet, whenever she betrayed these emotions of fear and abhorrence, the look of utter misery they would call up on his face would cause a momentary revulsion of feeling in her, melting her heart to tenderness and sympathy.
He would be quick to see this change and gather hope from it.
Sometimes during the day, when her pity for him almost broke her own heart, she would be on the verge of sacrificing all her future life, her religious principles, her very soul’s salvation, only to give him happiness, to drive away the look of misery from his face, and see him smile again.
Sometimes at night she would dream that she had really done this, that she had become her uncle’s wife. Then she would awake with a cry of terror and rejoice that it was but a dream. At other times she would not wake so soon, but would dream on of being married to her uncle, and horrified by her position and trying to run away to hide herself, to drown herself, to do anything rather than to fall into his hands, or be compelled to live with him as her husband, and so she would moan and sigh in her troubled sleep throughout the night, and wake at last prostrated, depressed and miserable, with the thought that all too probably, in some weak moment when pity should be in the ascendant, this hideous dream might become a more hideous reality.
She had no refuge in her wretchedness, no mother, sister or friend to whom she could confide her troubles. She could not even go away from her guardian or from Promontory Hall. She had no protector in the world but him, no home on earth but his house. Besides, he was her lawful guardian, and had a guardian’s power over her—if, indeed, he ever should choose to exercise it against her will, as he never yet had done, and as she was sure he never would do. But this power would last until she should become of age, or until she should marry; for by the terms of her father’s will, her bondage as a ward was to terminate with her majority or her marriage. Thus she had no refuge from the guardian who never sought to coerce her inclinations in any way, but through her affections, through her love, sympathy and compassion, had gained an ever-increasing and most fatal power over her.
More and more dangerous grew her position as days and weeks went by. Every day she was weaker, looking on her lover’s despair. Every night her dreams were more terrible in their likeness to reality. To prove the degree to which her brain and nervous system were becoming affected, she began to be confused by dreams within dreams—in this way: She would dream that she awoke from a dream, and, waking, found that she was really married and miserable!