“You do, Violet?” murmured Miss Letty, catching the girl’s hand in hers—“Are you sure you do?”
“Am I sure?” And Violet sprang up from her kneeling position, and stood with her fair head thrown back and her whole face expressing a grand disdain—“Indeed I am! I am sure that the man I thought a gentleman, is beneath contempt! I am sure that the love I bore him for what I thought his goodness, his chivalry, his honour, was the love for a fancied being of my own heart who did not exist! I am sure that I do not, and could not love a man who has deliberately disgraced himself and ruined the honour of a woman! I am sure—yes—that if I met Max Nugent now I would pass him by as beneath the notice of an honest girl! I mean it!” continued Violet, her eyes glowing more brilliantly than ever with the intensity of her thought. “Yes! for though I am only a girl, I have never done any harm to any one that I know of, nor would I hurt any one by so much as a word if I could help it, and so far at least I am above this millionaire, who has made himself too mean for even a man to know!”
The Major brought his hand down with a vigorous slap on the table near which he stood.
“There spoke Jack Morrison’s girl!” he exclaimed. “Blood will out! you have got your father’s mettle in you! Bravo! Let the fellow go to the dogs in his own way and be d——d to him!—excuse me!”
“Wait, uncle!” said Violet, looking at Miss Letty’s pained and anxious face with great tenderness in her eyes. “You must not think I don’t suffer! I do! When I saw that horrible news to-night—when I heard people talking of it, I felt like killing myself! Yes!”—for Miss Letty uttered a piteous exclamation,—“Yes, dear Miss Letty, you must not think I don’t feel. I feel cruelly!” Her lips trembled, her voice shook. “But you have both been so good to me—you have taken such care of me, that I should be a wicked, ungrateful girl if I thought of myself only. I think of you—dear kind Uncle Desmond!—darling sweet Miss Letty! and I will try to bear it bravely, I will indeed! I am trying now. Don’t you see I am? My heart is wounded, and the wound hurts—yes, it hurts! But I will try—I will try hard, that the pain may make me better!”
And here, her pride breaking down entirely, she fell again on her knees beside Miss Letty, and buried her head in her lap, sobbing bitterly. Quietly Miss Letty laid her two hands over the soft hair, stroking it gently,—and controlling her own tears, she made a gentle sign to the stricken Major to go. With a mute glance of farewell tenderness, that gallant officer stole out of the room on tiptoe,—and pausing in the hall outside, wiped his eyes and blew his nose guardedly lest he should make too much noise.
“God bless my soul!” he ejaculated. “These women beat everything! Break their hearts, and they say the pain shall make them better! ’Pon my soul! What brutes we men are—what revolting, dirty, selfish, downright brutes! We don’t deserve ever to have had mothers. Here, let me get out of this!”
And opening the street door gingerly, he closed it as gingerly after him, and stood for a moment in the street with the guilty air of a burglar who had just abstracted some valuable plate. And again he blew his nose—with greater freedom and vigour this time.
“Poor little girl!” he murmured. “Poor little Violet! Only nineteen!—and faces the music like an old warrior of a hundred battles! Brave child—brave child! And by Jove, what a beauty she’s growing! A positive beauty! Never noticed it till to-night, ’pon my soul.”
And a couple of lines suddenly came into his head as it seemed from nowhere,—lines he remembered vaguely, as having heard when quite a lad: