“Is it?” he retorted. “Don’t you think I’m blind. I’ve seen your soft looks at him; and, curse him, if he comes here again I’ll strangle him—an insidious crafty Jesuit. But don’t you think me such a child as to believe I’m to be treated like this.”
“You are hurting my wrist, Richard,” said Eve, coldly, and speaking firmly now, for as her cousin began to bluster she grew calm.
“Hang your wrist,” he said angrily; “my hands are not so tender as the parson’s, I suppose.”
“Richard,” she said, with her voice trembling as she spoke, “Mr Selwood has always been to me as a gentlemanly, very kind friend, and to you the best of friends.”
“Damn his friendship,” said Richard, looking ugly in his wrath. “He’s my enemy, and always has been, and he’s trying to win you away. Ah! I know what it means: I’m to be thrown over, and you take up with him.”
“Richard, this is as coarse as it is cruel and unjust,” cried Eve, now regularly roused; “and I will not submit to it. Mr Selwood is nothing to me but a friend.”
“Indeed!” said Richard, with a sneer; “then pray what may this great change mean?”
“Mean!” she cried, scornfully; and Richard’s eyes lit up, for he thought he had never seen her look so attractive before, “it means that you have cruelly outraged my feelings by your wickedness and deceit.”
“My deceit!” he cried.
“Yes,” she said, with contempt: “have you forgotten what I saw that evening in Ranby Wood? Have you forgotten the past year’s neglect and contemptuous indifference to all my affection? Shame on you, Richard; shame! You ask me to be your wife, and tell me I am promised to you. I am; but you have broken the ties, and if I could forgive you, it must be years hence, when I have learned the truth of your sorrow for what is past.”