"I cannot bear it," he said, lashing himself into a rage. "I will disown the marriage, and defy the Goldsmiths to prove it. Philip shall be my heir. This base-born son of mine shall never take his place!"
"And I," said Margaret, with a tremor in her sweet voice, "will never live with you again until you own your son. I will own him; and Philip, when he knows of his existence, will own him as his elder brother."
Her face was white with grief as his was with rage. She rose from her seat and stood looking at him for a moment, as if they were about to separate forever. He had just returned to her after one of the rare absences which had come but seldom during their married life. She could not recognize in him the husband she had loved so perfectly and trusted so implicitly. There was baseness and selfishness, treachery and utter worldliness, in this man; she acknowledged it, though it broke her heart to do so. Her grief was too great for words; and with a silent gesture of farewell she went away into an inner room, leaving him in a stupor of dismay.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
IN THE PINE WOODS.
After Philip left his father on the shore of the little lake he, too, wandered about in loneliness for the rest of the day, unable to bear his anxiety and trouble in Phyllis's presence, and equally unable to conceal them. She and Dorothy concluded that he was gone with his father on some hurried excursion. But early the next morning he knocked at the door of the room where the two girls were sleeping, and begged Phyllis to get up and go out with him into the pine woods lying behind the hotel. She grumbled a little, telling Dorothy in a sleepy tone that she could not bear going out before breakfast; at his urgent and reiterated entreaties, she relented, and, after keeping him waiting for nearly an hour, she made her appearance in a very becoming and very elaborate morning costume.
They were soon out of sight and hearing of the hotel, wandering slowly along the soft, dewy glades of the beautiful pine woods, with the morning sunlight streaming in long pencils through the openings of the green roof far above them. Here and there, through the rough, tawny trunks of the trees, they caught a glimpse of the great gray pinnacles of rock, with their fretwork of snow, rising high into the deep blue of the sky. Phyllis was enchanted with everything except the dew, which was spoiling the hem of her pretty dress, and taking the gloss off her little shoes.
"It is as beautiful as the scenery in the Midsummer Night's Dream at the Lyceum," she said. "Do you remember it, and that delicious music of Mendelssohn's? If it was moonlight I should expect to meet Oberon and Titania."
Phyllis felt that she was making herself very charming. Philip was an ardent admirer of Shakspere, and what could she say more agreeable to him than this allusion to one of his favorite plays? But, to her great surprise, he seemed not to hear what she was saying.
"My Phyllis," he said, "I have something really terrible to tell you."