"O Victor, come!" she says; "let the past be dead and forgotten. My darling, come back!"
But he shrinks away as those soft hands touch him, and pushes her off.
"Let me go!" he cries; "don't touch me, Inez! It can never be. You don't know what you ask!"
He stands confronting her now, pale as herself, with eyes alight. She recoils like one who has received a blow.
"Can never be?" she repeats.
"Can never be!" he answers. "I am what you have called me, Inez, a traitor and a coward. I stand here perjured before God, and you, and my dead mother. It can never be. I can never marry you. I am married already!"
The blow has fallen—the horrible, brutal blow. She stands looking at him—she hardly seems to comprehend. There is a pause—the firelight flickers, they hear the rain lashing the windows, the soughing of the gale in the trees. Then Victor Catheron bursts forth:
"I don't ask you to forgive me—it is past all that. I make no excuse; the deed is done. I met her, and I loved her. She has been my wife for sixteen months, and—there is a son. Inez, don't look at me like that! I am a scoundrel, I know, but—"
He breaks down—the sight of her face unmans him. He turns away, his heart beating horribly thick. How long the ghastly pause that follows lasts he never knows—a century, counting by what he undergoes. Once, during that pause, he sees her fixed eyes turn slowly to his mother's picture—he hears low, strange-sounding words drop from her lips:
"He swore by your dying bed, and see how he keeps his oath!"