'How dare you speak to me thus again?' she asked, with half-averted face, and her blue eyes flashing with a kind of steel-like glitter.
'Thus—how?' he asked, in a bewildered and rather indignant tone, as it seemed to her.
'In terms of love or regard!'
'What do you mean, Annabelle?' he asked, after a pause. 'Surely you have not permitted me to speak of love to you again—since that happy day in yonder gardens—or rather lured me into it, but to repel and cast me off, in revenge, for our quarrel in the foolish past time; beguiling me by your sweetness, but to fool me in the end?'
'I do not care what you think.'
'Good heaven! can it be that you do not love me, Annabelle—do not love me after all?'
'After all—all what, sir?'
'I hope, Annabelle,' said he, in the first faint tone of irritation she had ever heard from him, 'that after all this smoke, you have some fire to follow?'
'I do not understand you, Fotheringhame,' she replied, restraining her tears by a strong effort; 'but I fear that you are involved in something very dark and very dreadful. Who is Fanny—Fanny with the hazel eyes?' she demanded, passionately; 'Fanny, who is in the hands of the lawyers—who is so afraid of her husband, and for whom you sold your troop?'
Bewilderment first, and then anger, appeared in the proud face of Fotheringhame, who certainly seemed not to know what to think, and grew very pale. Then he smiled, sadly and bitterly, with something of anger making his lip quiver.