Mr. Conyers, being apparently weary of walking, leaned against the trunk of a tree to listen to the end of this outbreak, looking insolent defiance at the speaker. But Aurora's passion had reached that point in which all consciousness of external things passes away in the complete egoism of anger and hate. She did not see his superciliously indifferent look; her dilated eyes stared straight before her into the dark recess from which Captain Prodder watched his sister's only child. Her restless hands rent the fragile border of her shawl in the strong agony of her passion. Have you ever seen this kind of woman in a passion? Impulsive, nervous, sensitive, sanguine; with such a one passion is a madness—brief, thank Heaven! and expending itself in sharply cruel words, and convulsive rendings of lace and ribbon, or coroner's juries might have to sit even oftener than they do. It is fortunate for mankind that speaking daggers is often quite as great a satisfaction to us as using them, and that we can threaten very cruel things without meaning to carry them out. Like the little children who say, "Won't I just tell your mother!" and the terrible editors who write, "Won't I give you a castigation in the Market-Deeping 'Spirit of the Times,' or the 'Walton-on-the-Naze Athenæum!'"
"If you are going to give us much more of this sort of thing," said Mr. Conyers, with aggravating stolidity, "perhaps you won't object to my lighting a cigar?"
Aurora took no notice of his quiet insolence; but Captain Prodder, involuntarily clenching his fist, bounded a step forward in his retreat, and shook the leaves of the underwood about his legs.
"What's that?" exclaimed the trainer.
"My dog, perhaps," answered Aurora; "he's about here with me."
"Curse the purblind cur!" muttered Mr. Conyers, with an unlighted cigar in his mouth. He struck a lucifer-match against the back of a tree, and the vivid sulphurous light shone full upon his handsome face.
"A rascal!" thought Captain Prodder;—"a good-looking, heartless scoundrel! What's this between my niece and him? He isn't her husband, surely, for he don't look like a gentleman. But if he aint her husband, who is he?"
The sailor scratched his head in his bewilderment. His senses had been almost stupefied by Aurora's passionate talk, and he had only a confused feeling that there was trouble and wretchedness of some kind or other around and about his niece.
"If I thought he'd done anything to injure her," he muttered, "I'd pound him into such a jelly that his friends would never know his handsome face again as long as there was life in his carcass."
Mr. Conyers threw away the burning match, and puffed at his newly-lighted cigar. He did not trouble himself to take it from his lips as he addressed Aurora, but spoke between his teeth, and smoked in the pauses of his discourse.