In his excitement he characterizes her offense in terms more forcible than true. She is dumb with astonishment for a moment, then she walks straight up to him, a blaze of color rushing over her face and neck, while her eyes flash lightning scorn upon him.
"This to me!" she exclaims, her girlish voice ringing with passion and resentment. "Such an accusation to Harry Vere's daughter! Oh! for shame! How dare you!"
"You provoked it yourself," he answers, retreating before her, for her little hands were clenched wildly as if she would strike him down to earth; "I gave you my honored name to wear—a name as proud as your father's—and you have dragged it through the mire of a moonlight flirtation with a dandy, an idiot."
"It is false," she answers, proudly, "I never flirted in my life, I should not know how to do it. And there was no harm in my short walk down to the shore with Mr. Penn. No one could make harm of it except a man blinded by jealousy!"
A glimmer of the truth had begun to dawn upon her. It angered him bitterly to know that she had detected his weakness.
"I have been blinded by many things," he answers, furiously. "I was blinded by your beautiful face before I married you, and could not see that you had never received the proper training and education to fit you for the position to which I elevated you. My eyes have been opened by your recent conduct, and I find you simply an unformed child, utterly ignorant how to maintain your dignity as my wife!"
Word for word he is going over the specious sophistries of Felise, but he is utterly unconscious of the fact. He has been merely a pliant tool in her artful hands, but he believes that he has found out all these facts for himself, and he asserts them with a perfect conviction of truth.
For Bonnibel stands listening in stunned silence to his vehement rhodomontade. She has walked away from him a little way, and stands clinging to the back of a chair, as if to save herself from falling. The angry flush has died out of her face, and she looks marble-cold, and white even to her lips. As he pauses, she speaks in low, resentful accents:
"Colonel Carlyle, you are the first man who has ever offered me an insult!"