Placing her elbows on a small Chippendale table, off which, without ceremony, she thrust a few books, she rested her chin upon her left hand, and looking at the shrinking Maude steadily and defiantly—for the perfect purity of the girl, her position in life, her whole aspect and bearing filled this fallen one—for fallen she was—with rivalry, envy, and hatred, she asked:
'Now, who do you think I am?'
'That I have yet to learn,' replied Maude, who was moving towards the door, when the next words of the woman arrested her steps.
'Learn that I am Captain John Elliot's—lawful wife!'
'Oh—she is mad!' thought Maude, who neither tottered, nor fainted, nor made any outcry, deeming the bold assertion as totally absurd.
'You don't believe me, I suppose?'
'You must hold me excused if I do not,' replied Maude, thinking that she must temporise with a woman who, for all she knew, might bite her like a rabid dog; for poor Maude had very vague ideas of the ways and proclivities of lunatics in general.
She had but one desire, to rush past, to gain the door and escape; but was baffled by the expression of the woman's watchful black eyes. That she was not and never had been a lady was evident; neither did she seem of the servant class; so Maude's inexperienced eye was unable to fix her place in the scale of society, though her costume was good—if showy—even to her well-fitting gloves.
'You would wish to see my marriage-lines, I doubt not,' said the visitor with a smile, drawing a couple of folded papers from her bosom; 'but perhaps you had better read this first. I am a great believer in documentary evidence, and hope you are so too.'
Somewhat ostentatiously she flattened out a letter on the table, but carefully kept her hands thereon, as if in fear that it might be snatched away by Maude; and impelled by an impressible but hideous emotion of curiosity the latter drew near, and the woman with a slender forefinger traced out the lines she wished her to read—lines that seemed to seal the fate of Maude, whose dull eyes wandered over them like one in a dreadful dream—for the letter, if a forgery, was certainly to all appearance in the handwriting of Jack Elliot, and some of its peculiarities in the formation of capitals and certain other letters seemed to her too terribly familiar and indisputable.