"What next?" He paused and looked at her in astonishment "You ask what next? What next can there be, except to go the first thing to-morrow morning and take her away."
"Take her away!" Lady Helena repeated, setting her lips; "take her where, Victor? To you?"
His ghastly face turned a shade ghastlier. He caught his breath and grasped the back of the chair as though a spasm of unendurable agony had pierced his heart. In an instant his aunt's arms were about him, tears streaming down her cheeks, her imploring eyes lifted to his:
"Forgive me, Victor, forgive me! I ought not to have asked you that. But I did not mean—I know that can never be, my poor boy. I will do whatever you say. I will go to her, of course—I will fetch her here if she will come."
"If she will come!" he repeated hoarsely, disengaging himself from her; "what do you mean by if? There can be no 'if' in the matter. She is my wife—she is Lady Catheron—do you think she is to be left penniless and alone drudging for the bread she eats? I tell you, you must bring her; she must come!"
His passionate, suppressed excitement terrified her. In pain and fear and helplessness she looked at her niece. Inez, with that steady self-possession that is born of long and great endurance, came to the rescue at once.
"Sit down, Victor!" her full, firm tones said, "and don't work yourself up to this pitch of nervous excitement. It's folly—useless folly, and its end will be prostration and a sick-bed. About your wife, Aunt Helena will do what she can, but—what can she do? You have no authority over her now; in leaving her you resigned it. It is unutterably painful to speak of this, but under the circumstances we must. She refused with scorn everything you offered her before; unless these ten past months have greatly altered her, she will refuse again. She seems to have been a very proud, high-spirited girl, but her hard struggle with the world may have beaten down that—and—"
"Don't!" he cried passionately; "I can't bear it. O my God! to think what I have done—what I have been forced to do! what I have made her suffer—what she must think of me—and that I live to bear it! To think I have endured it all, when a pistol-ball would have ended my torments any day!"
"When you talk such wicked folly as that," said Inez Catheron, her strong, steady eyes fixed upon his face, "I have no more to say. You did your duty once: you acted like a hero, like a martyr—it seems a pity to spoil it all by such cowardly rant as this."
"My duty!" he exclaimed, huskily "Was it my duty? Sometimes I doubt it; sometimes I think if I had never left her, all might have been well. Was it my duty to make my life a hell on earth, to tear my heart from my bosom, as I did in the hour I left her, to spoil her life for her, to bring shame, reproach, and poverty upon her? If I had not left her, could the worst that might have happened been any worse than that?"