“Well, sir, what then?” severely demanded the General.
“I must admit,” said Alexander, with a flushed brow, and with some compunction awakened by the voice of her whom he had once loved, and with much shame at having to make the confession—“I must admit that, though there really was none, yet the poor girl supposed there was a marriage, since there was a semblance of one.”
“What, sir!” thundered the grand old soldier, “deceive a maiden with the ‘semblance’ of a marriage and call yourself a Lyon?”
“Again you mistake me, sir!” cried Alexander, a hot blush rushing over his face. “I also believed at the time it was performed that the ceremony which united us was a legal one. I continued to believe so, even after the hallucination which led to the false and fatal step had passed away—continued to believe so until last March, when I chanced to discover that by the accidental omission of an important form my marriage with this girl was illegal.”
“And of course, sir, having discovered such an error, you took the earliest opportunity of rectifying it and making your marriage legal?” said General Lyon, emphatically.
“Ah, sir! have I not told you that the illusion which lured me to the folly of such a misalliance was past and gone? No, sir, I was too happy to be free to retrieve my errors, and to come back, as in duty bound, to my first love and first faith,” said Alexander, turning and bowing deeply to Anna, who drew herself proudly erect and bent upon him a look of ineffable contempt.
“Oh, Alick, my Alick!” breathed Drusilla, in an almost expiring voice.
“Hush, dear child, hush! Don’t you see and hear that he is utterly beneath your love and regret?” whispered Miss Lyon, tenderly drawing the young bowed head upon her shoulder and pressing the poor broken heart to her bosom.
“Proceed, sir!” said General Lyon, scowling darkly.
“There is little more to say but this,” muttered Alexander, in an intensely mortified and irritated tone. “From the moment in which I discovered the illegality of my union with this girl, of course I broke with her—not harshly, but very gently. From that moment I treated her only as a sister, and visited her with less and less frequency until I ceased altogether. Until this hour, I assure you, my dear sir, I had not seen this girl for months, in fact not since April last. I meant never to see her again, but I took measures to provide handsomely for her future support. Such, my dear uncle, is the ‘head and front of my offending’—a boyish error, heedlessly fallen into, deeply repented of and eagerly atoned for. It is seldom that a young man’s follies are so cruelly exposed as mine have been this evening,” added Alexander, with an injured air.