Still she was looking at him with wide-open eyes.
"I can not, I will not believe anything so horrible!" she gasped. "It would drive me mad!"
"I assure you it is true," he declared. "Like yourself, I believed that the marriage was not binding. But I found it was, and that saved me from wedding another girl."
A cry that seemed to rend her heart in twain broke from her white lips.
"But tell me, what are you doing here?" he asked, wonderingly.
Then it was that something like an inkling of the truth came to him.
"Great God!" he cried, "it can not be possible that you are in any way connected with my cousin—that you are the bride he brought home? Speak! Why are you trembling so? Has my guess come anywhere near the mark?"
Ida looked up at him with wild, frightened eyes like those of a hunted deer.
"Speak!" he cried again, fiercely grasping her arm, "or I will wring the truth from you!"