But she snatched it from him hastily, gasping:
"Do not speak to me in that way! Do not call me love or wife!"
"No man on earth has a better right to speak to you in this way than I have. No other man in the world has the right to call you love or wife but me! You are my wife!" grimly answered the young count.
"I am the wife of the Duke of Hereward. Oh, Heaven, that I were a corpse instead!" gasped Valerie.
"'The wife of the Duke of Hereward!' Have you then forgotten our betrothal at St. Petersburg? Our flight from Warsaw to St. Vito? Our marriage at the little chapel of Santa Maria? Our short, blissful honeymoon in the vine-dresser's cottage under the Apennines?" he inquired, bitterly.
"I have forgotten nothing! Oh, Heaven! Oh, earth! Oh, Waldemar! that I could die! that I could die!" she wailed in low, heartbroken tones.
It was well for her that the corner sofa stood in the shade, far removed from the seats of the other guests in that long drawing-room.
"Valerie! love! wife!" he murmured again.
"Oh, Waldemar, if I were your wife, as I truly believed myself then to have been, oh, why did you not defend and protect me from all the world, even from my father—even from myself? Oh, why did you suffer me to be torn from your protection, to be deceived with a false story of your death, and forced into this marriage? Oh, Waldemar! if I were indeed and in truth your lawful wife, as I believed myself to be, why, oh why did you permit all these evils to happen to me? Ah, what a position is mine! What a position! I cannot bear it! I will not bear it! I will not live! I will kill myself! I ought to kill myself! It is the only way out of this!" she wailed, wringing her hands.
"I will kill that Duke of Hereward!" hissed Volaski, through his clenched teeth.