“Nonsense! Why—”
“Silence! You shall hear me now,” she continued, with her excitement growing. “I resisted all this till you almost forced me to care for you. You even make me now confess it in this shameless way, and, when you feel that you are the master, you play with me—trifle with my best feelings.”
“Gammon! Madge, what is the matter with you? I never dreamed of such a thing.”
“What!”
“Are you going mad?”
“Yes,” she cried passionately, “driven so by you. It is shameful. I could not have believed the man lived who would have treated a woman so basely. But I am not blind. There is a reason for it all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think me a child? I am to be won and then tossed aside for the new love—fancy, the poacher’s daughter, and when—”
“Don’t be a fool, Madge. You are saying words now that you will repent.”
“I’ll say them,” she cried, half wild with jealous rage, and her words sounding the more intense from their being uttered in a low, harsh whisper, “if I die for it. The gamekeeper’s daughter, the girl taken in here by your mother out of charity.”