She bowed her head a little, looking pensively at the ground. A thousand emotions swept across her charming face. Then she looked up, her eyes dancing with mischief,—arch, naughty, daring.
“A singular paradise for my Lord Clancarty,” she said, “a paradise with a Whiggish Protestant wife in it, and a Whiggish Protestant mother-in-law, and the greatest Whig in England for a brother-in-law. Sir, I need enumerate no more.”
The Irishman laughed a little bitterly.
“Madam,” he said, with daring tenderness in his tone, “you know not what love is! Who would count the cost—who loved? By all the saints, my lady, love burns away both politics and creeds; death itself is beaten by it—and hell! Ah, to teach you how to love. ’Twould be worth purgatory!” his gray eyes flashed, his strong face set itself sternly.
Lady Betty looking at him drew her breath hard; she was almost frightened. Here was a nature she could not conquer and she could not scorn. She bit her lip and looked steadily away, her heart beating in her throat.
“If Lord Clancarty came here,” he said after a moment, in a constrained voice, “would you see him? would you listen to him?”
She hesitated; she no longer believed that this man might be her husband; he had succeeded in misleading her, and her whole soul was tossing and burning in the fire of a new and passionate emotion, but she tried to think.
“I would see him, yes,” she said with white lips, glancing defiantly at him, “he is my husband.”
His eyes darkened and his face changed; she could not read it. They had come back to the old stone steps. At the top appeared Lady Sunderland and Lady Dacres, too far off as yet to be heard.
“He shall come, then, my lady,” he said very low, looking straight into her eyes, “he shall come—if he dies for it.”