Lorin stared at her in astonishment.
"What—do you know——" he began, when she cut him short.
"I know everything. Leave me and take him home!"
Then, before he could speak, she drew her hand from his arm and flew rather than walked the short distance to St. Mary's Crescent.
Once she had re-entered the house and gained the privacy of her own room, she threw herself face downwards on the bed, feeling utterly worn out and exhausted by the experiences of the past twenty-four hours. Before her closed eyes two faces arose in the darkness—those of the man she loved and the man who was her husband.
As she had last seen them, so they flitted before her, Lorin's face clouded by a look of distress and indignation, which changed to deep tenderness as his eyes met hers, and Wallace's distorted by drink and by fury, as she had seen it years ago upon her wedding-day and again beheld it on this eventful evening.
And as she marked the contrast between them and compared her instinctive dislike and disgust in the presence of her husband with the passionate delight which thrilled her at the proximity of her lover, a temptation stole into her mind and grew stronger every moment.
Why, she asked herself, should not the dead past bury its dead? Laline Armstrong had disappeared—Wallace himself had given out that she was dead and his cousin and uncle believed him. She would even have some difficulty in proving her identity; and without the testimony of Mrs. Melville, between whom and herself many miles of ocean rolled, she would find it almost impossible to connect Lina Grahame with Laline Garth. The latter was dead and her actions had died with her. Why should she, Lina Grahame, hesitate to marry the man she loved because that dead Laline had once gone through a form of marriage with his cousin?
It was quite clear that Wallace did not recognise his over-grown child-bride in the tall and slender woman who was engaged to his cousin; and even Lorin, who had at first been haunted by her likeness to a portrait he had seen of Laline as a child, failed to recall where the picture had met his eyes. Only her own word could betray her, and that word she was strenuously resolved not to utter.
Surely—surely, she argued, as she lay there like some dead thing, scarcely breathing, so intent she was in thought, she would be committing no great sin if she ignored the past? It was not as if Wallace wanted her, remembered her, or had even ever loved her. Wallace was hopeless; and she almost wondered now at her own conduct when she despatched Lorin to his cousin's aid that night. Was she to spoil Lorin's life, and her own as well, for the sake of a degraded and drunken creature, alike incapable of gratitude and of love?