“And I repeat that you are not,” said Mr. Black harshly. “The law will not recognize such a marriage. And if you persist in clinging to the prize you fancy you have hooked, I will have Rufus arrested on the charge of perjury and sent to prison.”
Lally uttered a cry of horror. Her eyes dilated, her thin chest heaved, her black eyes burned with the fires that raged in her young soul.
“Rufus has recognized the stern necessity of the case, and full of fears for his own safety he has given you up,” continued Lally’s persecutor. “He will never see you again, and desires you, if you have any regard for him and his safety, to quietly give him up, and glide back into your own proper sphere.”
“I will not give him up!” cried Lally—“never! never! Not until his own lips tell me so! You are cruel, but you cannot deceive me. I am his own wife, and I will never give him up!”
“Read that!” said Mr. Black, producing the note his son had written. “I presume you know his handwriting?”
He tossed to Lally the folded paper. She seized it and read it eagerly, her face growing white and rigid like stone. She knew the handwriting only too well. And in this letter Rufus confirmed his father’s words, and utterly renounced her. A conviction of the truth settled down like a funeral pall upon her young soul.
“You begin to believe me, I see,” said Mr. Black, growing uncomfortable under the awful stare of her horrified eyes. “You comprehend at last that you are no wife?”
“What am I then?” the pale lips whispered.
“Don’t look at me in that way, Miss Bird. Really you frighten me. Don’t take this thing too much to heart. Of course it’s a disappointment and all that, but the affair won’t hurt you as if you belonged to a higher class in life. It’s a mere episode, and people will forget it. You can resume your maiden name and occupations and marry some one in your own class, and some day you will smile at this adventure!”
“Smile? Ah, God!”