“I don’t know so much about that,” he replies savagely. “How about Hector D’Estrange?”
She starts, and the rich blood flushes to her face as she eyes him with evident terror. Can it be that he knows, that he will unveil the secret before—but no, it is impossible; she has it safe enough.
He notes the start, the crimson blush, and the look of terror, and he congratulates himself on having, by a chance shot, hit on the right point to cow her.
“You’re a fine person to play the prude and the proper,” he says, with a sneer. “They used to tell me that you were inconsolable over that ass Kintore, but the beauty of Hector D’Estrange appears to have effected a sudden cure. I congratulate you on your new conquest. You have aimed high. He is the rising man of his day, and you have thrown your net well to catch the golden fish. Are you not ashamed of yourself, however, woman,—you who are over the forties, to take up with a boy of twenty-one?”
She flushes again. Then he does not know? Thank God for that! How young she looks as she stands there in her unfading beauty, with a look in her blue eyes of contemptuous loathing. She will let him believe what he likes, so that he does not know the truth; that is all she desires to hide from him.
In pursuance of this desire she answers:
“Hector D’Estrange and I are friends. I am not ashamed to own it. Neither he nor I require your advice, however, as to how our friendship is to be conducted. And now I bid you leave me. I order you from my house, which I inhabit not by your charity.”
“No, but by the charity of Harry Kintore, you wanton!” he answers with an oath. “You knew pretty well what you were about when you got the fool to settle all his estates and money on you, which you now lavish on Hector D’Estrange, but——”
“Peace, devil! fiend in human shape!” she cries furiously, as she clenches her hands, and brings the right one down with a crash on the table beside her. He notices a flash on one of the fingers. All the others are ringless but this one, and on it sparkles two splendid diamonds and sapphires set deep in their broad thick band of gold. He knows this ring of old. He saw it long ago, when she held the dying head of Harry Kintore in her hands, and he knows that it was the young man’s gift to her. That she should wear it, now that she has taken up with Hector D’Estrange, mystifies him.
He is about to reply, when the door of the room they are in opens, and Lord Westray finds himself face to face with Hector. He is a head and shoulders taller than the earl is this young man, and as he advances into the room the latter’s face falls slightly, and his fingers move nervously by his side. Like all bullies, Lord Westray is a coward, and doesn’t half fancy his position.