"No!" Edith answered, her eyes flashing, "none! Having married me, not ten thousand family secrets should be strong enough to make him desert me. If he had come to me, if he had told me, as he was bound to do before our wedding-day, I would have pitied him with all my soul; if anything could ever have made me care for him as a wife should care for a husband, it would have been that pity. But if he came to me now, and knelt before me, imploring me to return, I would not. I would die sooner!"
She was walking up and down now, gleams of passionate scorn and rage in her dark eyes.
"It is all folly and balderdash, this talk of his love for me making him leave me. Don't let us have any more of it. No secret on earth should make a bridegroom quit his bride—no power on earth could ever convince me of it!"
"And yet," the sad, patient voice of poor Lady Helena sighed, "it is true."
Edith stopped in her walk, and looked at her incredulously.
"Lady Helena," she said, "you are my kind friend—you know the world—you are a woman of sense, not likely to have your brain turned with vapors. Answer me this—Do you think that, acting as he has done, Sir Victor Catheron has done right?"
Lady Helena's sad eyes met hers full. Lady Helena's voice was full of pathos and earnestness, as she replied:
"Edith, I am your friend; I am in my sober senses, and, I believe in my soul Victor has done right."
"Well," Edith said after a long pause, during which she resumed her walk, "I give it up! I don't understand, and I never shall. I am hopelessly in the dark. I can conceive no motive—none strong enough to make his conduct right. I thought him mad; you say he is sane. I thought he did me a shameful, irreparable wrong; you say he has done right. I will think no more about it, since, if I thought to my dying day, I could come no nearer the truth."
"You will know one day," answered Lady Helena; "on his death-bed; and, poor fellow, the sooner that day comes the better for him."