Again he walked across the room and returned.
"Oh, I know it seems paltry, and it is paltry, the scheme of a harlequin; all the same, I knew that it would make you feel what I had felt. I knew your proud nature, and that you would never be able to hold up your head again. I was sure that this would wound you a thousand times more than poverty, or any other calamity which men fear. As for Sprague, I had prepared for his fall. He should be ruined, disgraced, a penniless vagrant.
"You despise me. Yes, yes, I know; but it was my plan of revenge, and knowing you as I do, it was the most fiendish thing I could conceive of. Not that I have a wife; no, great God, after knowing you, I could never marry another, but this was my plan. I determined, too, that a history of the man you had married, this Leicester whom you had scorned, should be published in all the newspapers—a history which told of him as one who for six years had lived in the foulest corruption. I fancied your being discussed in every clubroom in London, in every ale-house in England, that you, the proud Olive Castlemaine, who had driven away Radford Leicester because of your pride, had afterwards married him—him who was the husband of another woman, and the most corrupt blackguard who ever walked God's earth.
"Yes, yes, it was mean enough, paltry enough, but it was cruel too, and I gloated over my plan, for the devil possessed me. I had risen again from the dead to wreak my vengeance.
"Well, you remember last night? You promised to be my wife. I held you in my arms, I kissed you, you kissed me. For a moment I ceased to hate; I loved again, and the love was heaven. But when I left you, I vowed that I would not turn aside from the path I had marked out. This morning I could not come to you, I wanted to go away on the hills alone, I wanted to visit the scenes in which I had made my vows years ago.
"I went into a farmhouse where a simple and pure farmer's dame talked to me in the old days. To-day she talked to me again, and she made me feel that I was a fool. She made me realise that if I dragged you into hell, I should go into a deeper hell myself. She made me realise that there was a God in the world other than I knew of. Still I determined to go on as I had begun."
He stopped again, as if not knowing how to proceed with his story; then he told her of his walk across the moors, and of that wondrous experience which was too deep for words, of how God had come to him and had given him a new heart.
"Ever since last night I have known that I love you," he said; "ay, I knew that I loved you with a love too deep for words, but I would not confess it to myself until to-day. But I knew, too, that it was too late, because if I were unworthy of you years ago, I am a thousand times less worthy now. Then God told me to tell you what I have told you."
Leicester rose to his feet.
"Now I have told you—what I came to tell you," he said. "It was right that you should know, and I have told you. That is all, I think; so I will go. I do not ask you to forgive me—I do not, cannot expect that. Good-night."