“Maude!”
“You recoil from me in horror! I knew it would be so. I deserve it—I deserve it! but oh, Lord Villiers, it will kill me!” she cried, passionately wringing her hands.
“Maude, are you mad?”
“I am not—oh, I am not! if a grief-crazed brain, a blighted life, a broken heart be not madness.”
“But, Maude! Good heavens! You are so young—not yet eighteen! Oh, it cannot be true!” he cried, incoherently.
“Would to God it were not! Yet four years ago I was a wedded wife!”
“Wife, mother, and widow at eighteen! Maude, Maude, how can I realize this?”
“Oh, I was crazed! I was mad! and I did love him so, then! Not as I love you, Lord Ernest, with a woman’s strong, undying affection, but with the wild, passionate fervor of youth. I must have inherited my dead mother’s Spanish blood; for no calm-pulsed English girl ever felt love like that.”
“Oh, Lady Maude!—Lady Maude! I could hardly have believed a messenger from heaven had he told me this.”
“God be merciful to human error! A long life of sorrow and remorse must atone for that first rash fault.”