"Don't be a fool." The brutality, foreign as it was to Forbes' training and temperament, seemed demanded by the occasion. "My heart and all the rest of me was yours while you chose to keep me. You threw me away like a worn glove when my trouble came, and looked about for a more fitting match."
"Burton, you said yourself—"
"I own I made your way easy for you, Julia. I was fool enough to be satisfied to have you yourself and made no inconvenient demands in the way of loyalty and truth. And the fate you are so fond of invoking was kinder to me than I deserved."
"You love her. You love that abandoned—"
"Stop!" he commanded. "Don't dare finish." But he himself went on talking rapidly. "As far as Miss Kent is concerned, of course I have made it impossible for her ever to think well of me again, since after her months of uninterrupted kindness, I could listen to your venomous attack upon her, and not speak a word in her defense."
"How dare you! How dare you speak like that to me!"
"Whether I love her or not, I don't know. It's too bewildering for me to be sure. But I know she's the most loyal friend, and the dearest comrade and the bravest, most unselfish—"
Julia sprang from her place beside him with a cry. His face was toward her, and at the sound of her voice, an extraordinary thing happened. He saw her for an instant quite distinctly, though the face he had loved had undergone as hideous a change as if death and decay had done their devastating work upon it. Secure in the knowledge of his blindness, she faced him with the mask thrown aside. He saw her features distorted by hate, her eyes narrowed malignantly, her lips drawn back from the teeth. Something Hephzibah Diggs had said in their memorable interview flashed across his mind. "When she showed herself up for what she was, you'd ought to have got down on your marrow bones and thanked the Lord."
Darkness shut down over the unwelcome vision. There was a rushing in his ears so that he heard only faintly Julia's farewell, "I hate you! Oh, how I hate you!" He leaned back against the cushions, realizing that he was a sick man, but enveloped in a strange serenity. When next the parlor maid proffered her services, he sent her to telephone for his physician. An hour later he was comfortably ensconced in a private hospital on the outskirts of the city, and sick as he felt, his mood was increasingly cheerful, for the doctor considered the momentary return of vision, elusive and disappointing as it had been, most encouraging.