His mouth expanded with an ugly smile as his eyes met hers. The girl thought that he looked like the incarnate spirit of evil, and that his figure harmonised with the hideous surroundings.
“I am so pleased to see you, Miss Audaer,” he said, courteously enough. His old pedagogic manners seemed to have given place to a burlesque of those of the earl. “But I am surprised, too, for I had heard that you were married.”
“No,” said Deborah, “I am not married.”
“Well, I am jealously inclined to be glad that no unworthy wretch of a man has yet obtained a prize much too good for him. But matrimony seems to be in the air just now, and I didn’t know whether you had yet fallen a victim. Rees and Lady Marion Cenarth are the last pair. But of course you’ve heard that. It’s a secret at present, and I’m the letter-carrier.”
He held out for her inspection a letter, stamped and directed to “M.C.” at a shop in South Audley-street.
Deborah was for the moment so absolutely stunned as to be incapable, not only of showing, but of feeling anything. She looked at the envelope and appeared to be examining the address, which she perceived to be in Rees’s handwriting. She was intelligent enough to understand in a moment the meaning of Rees’s strange love-making and the extent to which the evil influence of the man before her had corrupted the unhappy lad. At the same time there sprang up in her mind a defiant determination that this depraved Goodhare should not triumph in her humiliation.
“I did not know of it,” she said at last, very quietly, “though I rather guessed at something of the sort from his manner. Are they already married then?” she went on; and, having quite recovered her serenity she looked up in his face.
Goodhare was puzzled, disappointed. This she saw and hated him for.
“I’m not sure whether they’re married yet,” he said; “but, at any rate, they’re going to be. They’ve been corresponding all this year.”
“Oh dear, I hope the earl won’t be very angry.”