"Curse her!" he muttered, as he tossed down the raw spirit in his glass. "I wish, with all my soul, that I could do her an injury!"
CHAPTER XXII.
When Laline left the study and fled up-stairs to her room, she had by no means terminated her adventures for the day.
At first she could do nothing but sit with her hands tightly clasped in her lap, half-numbed by the extent of her misfortune. Her folly in failing to distinguish between the two cousins appeared to her now equally inexcusable and incomprehensible. Gradually, as she collected in her mind the evidence upon which she had acted, a conviction strengthened within her mind that she had been only too desirous of deceiving herself.
"I loved him, and so I persisted in believing he was my husband!" was the despairing cry of her heart. She had fallen in love at first with the younger Wallace Armstrong, and had encouraged herself in loving him by assuring herself that she was his wife already. This was now the first week in February, the month in which they were to have been married. Laline sprang from her chair at the thought and pressed her hands to her burning cheeks.
"How can I tell him?" she cried aloud. "How can I say that I must break it off and that we must never meet again, when only yesterday I kissed him and let him kiss me, and promised to be his wife? It is all horrible—impossible! What excuse can I give that he will believe? I cannot go to him and say, 'I will not marry him because I am his cousin's wife!' No one must ever know that. I would a thousand times rather die at this moment than be claimed by that horrible man, the very sight of whom turns me sick with disgust and hate! How could I ever think that Lorin, my Lorin, could have acted like that at Boulogne, could have ever been a gambler and a forger, ungrateful, deceitful, selfish, dissipated, and worthless?"
A wave of joy passed over her heart, in spite of her grief and perplexity, at the thought that the man she loved was in very truth the honourable and chivalrous gentleman Mrs. Vandeleur had declared him to be. Like Tennyson's "Lily maid of Astolat," Laline felt it was—
"Her glory to have loved
One peerless, without stain."