A low cry of despair broke from Olive's white lips. This was not what she had expected—at the worst, she had never thought of this.
"His wife!" she cried, "and what, then, am I?"
Val sat dumb. It was not a very pleasant question to answer; and, to tell the truth, he was more than a little afraid of the lightning flashing from those midnight eyes.
"What am I?" she repeated, in a voice almost piercing in its shrillness. "What am I? If she is his wife, what am I?"
"My dear madam, it is a most wicked affair from beginning to end, and you have been most shamefully duped. Believe me, I pity you from the very bottom of my heart."
With a cry that Val Blake never forgot, in its broken-hearted anguish and despair, she dropped down on the sofa, and buried her face among the pillows, as if she would have shut out the world and its miseries, as she did the sight of the man before her.
Mr. Blake, not knowing any panacea for misery such as this, and fearing to turn consoler, lest he should make a mess of it, did the very best thing he could have done, let it alone, and began the story he had to tell. So, lying there in her bitter humiliation, this woman heard that her miserable secret was a secret no longer, and that the pale, silent actress of Mrs. Butterby's lodgings had been Nathalie Marsh, and was now Paul Wyndham's beloved wife. That was the misery—she scarcely heeded, in the supreme suffering of that thought, the discovery of her own trickery and deceit—she only knew that the man she had thought her husband, and who, in spite of herself, she had learned to love, had cruelly and shamefully deceived her. She had never for one poor moment been his wife, never for an instant had a right to his name; she was only the poor despised tool, whom he used at the bidding of the wife he loved. The horrible agony she suffered lying there, and thinking of those things, no human pen can tell—no heart conceive.
Mr. Blake rose up when he finished his narrative, thankful it was over. She had never moved or spoken all the time, but he knew she had heard him, and he paused, with his hand on the door, to make a last remark.
"I beg, my dear young lady, you will not be overcome by this unfortunate affair. It will be kept as close as possible, and you need not be disturbed in the possession of Redmon, since such is Miss Rose's wish. I have done my duty in telling you, though the duty has been a very unpleasant one, good-morning, madam."
She never moved. Val looked at the prostrate figure with a vague uneasiness, and remembered it was just such women as this that swallowed poison, or went down to the river and drowned themselves. He thought of it all the way to Mrs. Marsh's, growing more and more uneasy all the time.