She had been strangely attracted to Lilith from the first meeting with her, and she had grown to love the girl with the fond, protecting love of an elder sister. She had given Lilith her confidence, revealed her inmost heart, told her love-story—even her love for Tudor Hereward to Tudor Hereward’s unknown wife! What a mortification in the thought that she had done so! Yet, there was a selfish comfort, which she blamed herself for taking, in the reflection that it was to the unloved and discarded wife that she had told this story.
She had within the past few days had her heart’s deepest affections raised from despair to something near absolute certainty. “Her hopes soared up like fire!” And in the exaltation of her spirits she had called on Lilith to share her joy and to congratulate her—only to have them all extinguished by the damper of the girl’s communication—“Tudor Hereward’s wife still lives.... I am Tudor Hereward’s most unhappy wife!”
How all her soul had risen up in defiance and contradiction of that statement until its truth was pressed in upon her consciousness. And then, all her sense of justice, all her powers of self-command were required to pass calmly through the ordeal of the interview that ensued. She had passed through it successfully. She had so mastered her pain and repressed her heart that she now felt sure Hereward’s young wife regarded Leda Von Bruyin’s love for him as the mere passing fancy of a wealthy woman of the world, soon to be forgotten in the change of travel or the whirl of society. She felt no jealousy of this despised and discarded wife, as she might have felt had Lilith been the beloved, honored and cherished companion of her husband; on the contrary, she felt pity, affection and sympathy for the poor, lonely and dependent child.
But her spirit blazed out in fierce anger of Tudor Hereward’s whole course of conduct toward them both, so that she was very unjust to him.
“He has ruined two lives by his arrogant recklessness and precipitation. He loved me; he never loved that poor girl. He loved me, and he ought to have waited, in hope and faith, as long as I continued unmarried. He ought not to have rushed into matrimony with that young creature whom he never loved, and so made her miserable and put an insurmountable obstacle between himself and me! Or—having married her, he should have cherished her and not discarded her.
“No, Tudor Hereward,” she continued to herself, “you are no longer the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, that I once believed you! And—if I suffer now, it is not that I love you still, but that my love is dying hard—very, very hard!
“But I will take a queenly revenge upon you, my master! A most noble and royal revenge. This child-wife whom you have discarded shall be to me as the dearest little sister. She is already beautiful, elegant and graceful by nature. She is cultivated, refined and accomplished by education; all she needs is intercourse with the highest European circles to give her the tone and manner of the most cultured society. And that she shall have. I will introduce her, not as my salaried companion—though she shall have her salary and much more than her salary—but as my own adopted sister. And when you see her again, Tudor Hereward, you will not be likely to despise her.
“And oh!” she passionately broke forth, “that I had the power to annihilate the very fragments of that broken marriage tie and the very memory of it, in her mind, and give her, all perfect as I shall make her, into the hands of some nobler husband! But no! that would not be a worthy revenge.
“To give her back, a pearl above price, to you, perhaps! Can I do that? Can I conquer myself so entirely? That would be a magnanimous revenge.”
So ran the thoughts of the petted beauty, rioting through a mind governed rather by feeling than by reason, yet with much more of good than evil in it.