Spencer laughed bitterly.
“Quite human, Elizabeth,” he said sneering, “as human as my termagant sister—as the rogue they are carrying now to the Tower, where, I trust, he’ll rest well—and safe.”
She recoiled half way across the room and stared at him wildly, as if her very senses were bewildered.
“To the Tower?” she repeated, like a child who had a lesson by rote, “the great gloomy Tower yonder?”
“Would you have preferred Newgate?” my lord asked maliciously, beginning to find some joy in a situation that had not been without humiliation.
“They carry my husband to the Tower!” Lady Betty cried wildly, clasping her hands to her bosom as if to still the tumult there, “and I stand here talking to the Judas who betrayed him! Go hang yourself, my lord,—surely you cannot want to live,” she went on, mad with her despair; “let me see your face no more. The very air you breathe poisons me. Never, never shall the same roof shelter us again! I go, sir, your sister no longer, but the beggar’s wife. I go to share his fate, to starve with him, to die for him or with him! But to see you no more forever and forever!”
She rushed past him, sweeping her skirts aside that they might not so much as touch him, and ran wildly out of the room.
Fleeing through the long galleries and down the stairs, in her splendid dress, and heedless of the gaping servants and of the bitter cold she went out, bareheaded, into the night.