"He never was your lover? You are telling me the truth?"
"No, no—never! never, Victor—don't look like that! Oh, what brought that wretched picture here! I knew him slightly—only that—and he did give me his photograph. How could I tell he was the wretch you say he is—how could I think there would be any harm in taking a picture? He seemed nice, Victor. What did he ever do?"
"He seemed nice!" Sir Victor repeated, bitterly; "and what did he ever do? What has he left undone you had better ask. He has broken every command of the decalogue—every law human and divine. He is dead to us all—his sister included, and has been these many years. Ethel, can I believe—"
"I have told you, Sir Victor. You will believe as you please," his wife answers, a little sullenly, turning away from him.
She understands him. His very jealousy and anger are born of his passionate love for her. To grieve her is torture to him, yet he grieves her often.
For a tradesman's daughter to marry a baronet may be but one remove from paradise; still it is a remove. And the serpent in Lady Catheron's Eden is the ugliest and most vicious of all serpents—jealousy. He has never shown his green eyes and obnoxious claws so palpably before, and as Sir Victor looks at her bending over her baby, his fierce paroxysm of jealousy gives way to a fierce paroxysm of love.
"Oh, Ethel, forgive me!" he says; "I did not mean to wound you, but the thought of that man—faugh! But I am a fool to be jealous of you, my white lily. Kiss me—forgive me—we'll throw this snake in the grass out of the window and forget it. Only—I had rather you had told me."
He tears up the wretched little mischief-making picture, and flings it out of the window with a look of disgust. Then they "kiss and make up," but the stab has been given, and will rankle. The folly of her past is doing its work, as all our follies past and present are pretty sure to do.