To attempt the role of a lover again, after all that had passed, and after all that he was aware must be known to Miss Raymond, was, he knew, impossible; but he had a trump card to play in the way of extortion—plain, blunt, rascally extortion; so, conceiving that the girl was utterly alone, he could not for the life of him resist bantering her a little, all the more as the utter loathing and dread her face expressed, enraged him.
'Mr. Holcroft!' she exclaimed, in a breathless voice, as she recoiled and became white as a lily.
'Yes, Hawke Holcroft, the man your fatal beauty has made him,' said he, with melodramatic gloom and folded arms; 'when I met you first I met my fate—a love that was my doom. But for you, would I ever have been mad enough to attempt the life of Allan Graham?'
'How dare you come here—how dare you speak to me thus!' said Olive, glancing at the bell handle; but he planted himself between it and her.
'The love of you came to me when first you looked into my face,' he resumed, in his melodramatic style; 'I remember it was but a smile—a smile; yet a mist came before my eyes—a something stirred my heart. Ah, Olive Raymond, it was your beautiful eyes that suddenly kindled new life within me—that will only end with the old.'
Olive was more irritated than alarmed now.
'How dare you come here?' she asked.
'I can't help it—needs must when old Boots drives,' said he; 'I came to show you a work of art. Look here.'
From his pocket-book he drew out and held before her at arm's length the cabinet photo of herself in a ball-dress; the photo, or one like it, that she had the folly to give him at Dundargue; but to her horror and dismay she saw that it had been reproduced, reversed, and manipulated in some way by some low photographer, and combined with one of Holcroft himself, posed as if in the act of embracing her, forming a strange group of two, whose likenesses there would be no mistaking, more especially that of her, as it was a miraculous work of art in its truth and individuality.
It was Olive to the life, with her brightest and sweetest expression now bent on his face!