“I have never cherished any such hope; I never shall.”
“Then why have you come here so continually?”
“For God’s sake, do not ask me that question! The time has not come.”
“Yes, Mr. Castellani, the time has come. The question should have been asked sooner. You have compromised Miss Ransome by your meaningless assiduities. You have compromised me; for I ought to have taken better care of her than to allow an acquaintance of so ambiguous a character. But I am very glad that I have spoken, and that you have replied plainly. From to-day your visits must cease. We shall go to the south of Italy in a few days. Let me beg that you will not happen to be travelling in the same direction.”
Mildred was deeply indignant. She had cheapened her husband’s niece—Randolph Ransome’s co-heiress—a girl whom half the young men in London would have considered a prize in the matrimonial market: and this man, who had haunted her at home and abroad for the last seven or eight weeks, dared now to tell her that his attentions were motiveless so far as her niece was concerned.
“O, Mildred, do not banish me!” he cried passionately. “You must have understood. You must know that it is you, and you only, for whom I care; you whose presence makes life lovely for me, in whose absence I am lost and wretched. You have wrung my secret from me. I did not mean to offend. I would have respected your strange widowhood. I would have waited half a lifetime. Only to see you, to be near you—your slave, your proud, too happy slave. That was all I would have asked. Why may that not be? Why may I not come and go, like the summer wind that breathes round you, like the flowers that look in at your window—faithful as your dog, patient as old Time? Why may it not be, Mildred?”
She stood up suddenly before him, white to the lips, and with cold contempt in those eyes which he had seen so lovely with the light of affection when they had looked at her husband. She looked at him unfalteringly, as she might have looked at a worm. Anger had made her pale, but that was all.
“You must have had a strange experience of women before you would dare to talk to any honest woman in such a strain as this, Mr. Castellani,” she said. “I will not lower myself so far as to tell you what I think of your conduct. Miss Ransome shall know the kind of person whose society she has endured. I must beg that you will consider yourself as much a stranger to her as to me from to-day.”
She moved towards the bell, but he intercepted her.
“You are very cruel,” he said; “but the day will come when you will be sorry that you rejected the most devoted love that was ever offered to woman, in order to be true to broken bonds.”