“No!”
“Are you in earnest, Miss Jeffries? Think well before you speak. You know the alternative; do you choose it?”
“I do; any thing were better than being the wife of a man I loathe and detest.”
“You will find yourself mistaken before many days, mark well what I say. I am not to be deterred from my resolve.”
“I am resolved.”
“Once again I enjoin, nay entreat you to reflect. You are, metaphorically speaking, at the forks of a road. One leads, if not to perfect happiness, to at least, an easy, indolent life, well garnished with luxuries; the other to—a horrible, unknown death.”
“Fiend!”
“I am, Miss Jeffries, I acknowledge it. Yet I can be most tender and agreeable when I choose. Fiend! that is a harsh word, yet I take a strange sort of pride in it. You do not know my early life. Well, I will relate it. Meanwhile you can, in listening, form some opinion of death by starvation. I love you fondly, tenderly, Miss Kate, as only one of my disposition can; and it is for this reason that I treat you so cruelly. It is one of the contradictions of my nature. But I will go on with my history.”
He lighted his quaint, costly pipe, and begging her pardon as politely as any native of France, began in his rich, round voice, occasionally making a gesture with the ease of an experienced orator.
“I am a native, of nowhere, and my parents were nobody. That is, my parents either died or deserted me when very young, as I was found, a frail infant in the middle of one of New York’s busiest thoroughfares, in early morning, by a young roystering blade, rolling home in the morning. He took me to a foundling asylum, and left me to live or die—as my nurses by their care or neglect, might will.