"Yes, I—I, who have wronged him deeply by a most fatal engagement which I have regretted ever since it was made. Not because you are not lovely, fascinating, all that is fairest and most desirable in womankind: but because I am hateful to myself on account of that treachery. What! to be the affianced lover of a woman whose husband's hand I grasped in seeming friendship: to smile in his face, to accept his kindness, his friendship, his confidence, while all my life was one long waiting for his death, while you and I were saying to each other every day, by and by we will do this, by and by we will go here and there, sail our yacht in the Mediterranean, build our cottage on the Scotch moor, by and by, when that good man who trusted us both is in his grave! O, it has been a hateful position, Valeria, base, miserable, guilty, accursed, for both of us: and, by the God who made us, it must come to an end."
There had been tears in his voice almost from the beginning of his speech, and at the end he broke down altogether and sobbed aloud.
Valeria rose out of her low chair, and stood before him straight as a dart. The movement was so quick, so instinct with an unholy grace, that it recalled the image of a cobra he had once seen rise up straight before him in the midst of his path through the jungle.
"You are in love with another woman!" she hissed, like the serpent. "That is the meaning of this sudden outbreak of virtue!"
He could not deny it.
"You want to break with me, in order that you may marry some one else," she said, whiter than death, her eyes dilating, her lips quivering.
"Yes," he answered quietly. "I could form a happier tie if you set me free. But there is not one word which I said just now about the feeling of my own baseness which was not just as true two years ago as it is to-day. Such a bond as ours never could bring happiness, Valeria, to man or to woman."
"It gave us hope," she said; "a fair dream of the future. Well, it is all over. Whatever it is worth it is gone—like a tuft of thistledown blown into the air. Go, Bothwell Grahame, you are your own man again; go and marry your new love."
"It will not be a marriage of to-day or to-morrow," answered Bothwell gravely. "My new love and I will have to wait for better times. First, I am a pauper; and, secondly, there is a taint upon my name, inasmuch as the good people of Bodmin and the neighbourhood have taken it into their wise heads that I am a murderer, because I refused to answer some very impertinent questions at the inquest. Valeria, will you forgive me—will you believe——"
"That you were heartily tired of me ages ago, before you left India," she said, interrupting him with a feverish rapidity. She had sunk into her low chair again, and was seated with her hands clasped upon the basket-work, bedizened with trappings of Oriental embroidery, like an Arab's horse—her eyes gazing over the wide panorama of land and sea, the dockyards, the river, the lighthouse yonder, and the long line of surf dashing against the breakwater.