“Softly, my dear; sh-h-h!”
His face, in spite of his efforts to retain its benign expression, is growing vindictive and cruel. He comes toward her with slow cat-like movements.
But she glides backward as he advances, and, putting the table between herself and him, she hurries on, never heeding that she has, by this movement, increased the distance from the outer door—and safety.
“You have carried your game too far!” she says. “When you first appeared before me, so soon after the loss of my adopted parents that it would seem you were waiting for that event—”
“So we were, my child,” he interrupts, “for we had promised not to come near you during their lifetime.”
“You had promised never to approach me, never to claim me, as the documents I found among my mother’s—among Mrs. Uliman’s papers prove. Oh,” she cries, wringing her hands and lifting her fair face heavenward; “oh, my mother! my dear, sweet, gentle mother! Oh, my father! the truest, the tenderest a wretched orphan ever had on earth! that Death should take you, and Life bring me such creatures to fill your places! But they cannot, they never shall!”
“Oh, good Lord!” mutters Papa under his breath, “those fools upstairs will hear too much!”
But Leslie’s indignation has swallowed up all thought of caution, and her words pour out torrent-like.
“Oh, if I had but denounced you at the first!” she cries; “or forced you to prove your claim! Oh, if you had shown yourselves then in all your greed and heartlessness! But while I was Leslie Uliman, with only a moderate fortune, you were content to take what I could give, and not press what you are pleased to term your claim upon my affections. Affections! The word is mockery from your lips! In consideration of the large sums I paid you, you promised never to approach me in the future, and I, fool that I was, believing myself free from you, married David Warburton, only to find myself again your victim, to know you at last in all your baseness.”
Papa Francoise, unable to stem the tide of her eloquence, shows signs of anger, but she never heeds him.