“By what right do you forbid me to speak of that girl as I choose?” she demanded, in a voice hard and cold with intense passion.
Once or twice Rex paced the length of the room, his arms folded upon his breast. Suddenly he stopped before her.
“What is this girl to you?” she asked.
With white, quivering lips Rex answered back:
“She is my wife!”
The words were spoken almost in a whisper, but they echoed like thunder through the room, and seemed to repeat themselves, over and over again, during the moment of utter silence that ensued. Rex had told his pitiful secret, and felt better already, as if the worst was over; while his mother stood motionless and dumb, glaring upon him with a baleful light in her eyes. He had dashed down in a single instant the hopes she had built up for long years.
“Let me tell you about it, mother,” he said, kneeling at her feet. “The worst and bitterest part is yet to come.”
“Yes, tell me,” his mother said, hoarsely.
Without lifting up his bowed head, or raising his voice, which was strangely sad and low, Rex told his story––every word of it: how his heart had went out to the sweet-faced, golden-haired little creature whom he found fast asleep under the blossoming magnolia-tree in the morning sunshine; how he protected the shrinking, timid little creature from the cruel insults of Pluma Hurlhurst; how he persuaded her to marry him out in the starlight, and how they had agreed to meet on the morrow––that morrow on which he found the cottage 95 empty and his child-bride gone; of his search for her, and––oh, cruelest and bitterest of all!––where and with whom he found her; how he had left her lying among the clover, loving her too madly to curse her, yet praying Heaven to strike him dead then and there. Daisy––sweet little, blue-eyed Daisy was false; he never cared to look upon a woman’s face again. He spoke of Daisy as his wife over and over again, the name lingering tenderly on his lips. He did not see how, at the mention of the words, “My wife,” his mother’s face grew more stern and rigid, and she clutched her hands so tightly together that the rings she wore bruised her tender flesh, yet she did not seem to feel the pain.
She saw the terrible glance that leaped into his eyes when he mentioned Stanwick’s name, and how he ground his teeth, like one silently breathing a terrible curse. Then his voice fell to a whisper.