In placing herself in the dock, so to speak, Mrs. Moxton had been defiant, loud-voiced and reckless, daring Ellis to denounce her for a crime of which she knew herself innocent. His refusal, and the cause he gave for such refusal, took her by surprise. Long since she had guessed that the doctor loved her, but she did not count on his proclaiming the fact so soon. Nor would he have done so had he not been thrown off his guard by her appeal. But her demand and his answer to it produced on both sides a stupefied calm. Ellis, frightened at his own boldness, remained silent after uttering the fatal words; Mrs. Moxton, on the other hand, felt her wrath die away in sheer surprise. Then her cheeks flushed from an unexplained emotion, and a light beamed from her eyes.
"You love me!" she murmured softly, and looked at Ellis.
Something in her regard, her tone, in her whole attitude, seemed to melt the frozen silence of the man. He sprang forward and touched her hand.
"You are not angry?" he asked, with eagerness.
The touch recalled Mrs. Moxton to a sense of what she owed to herself, and woke in her a feeling of wrath at the audacity of the man, who could speak the word to a woman lately widowed in so terrible a manner.
"How dare you!" she cried angrily, retreating. "What must you think of me to talk like that!"
"I think the world of you," replied Ellis, doggedly. "I have said the truth."
"You deceive yourself. What you take for the truth is fantasy. You cannot love one whom you have known only three weeks."
"Love can be born of a glance."
"In romances, I grant, but not in real life." She paused and burst out laughing. "Oh, it is too absurd."