"You lie, false-hearted girl! You loved me well, and you love me still. Love can not be so quickly unlearned. It is ambition that tempted you from me—that love of gold that always cursed your weak nature!" he returned, scornfully, stinging her to retort, angrily:
"What then? You can not help yourself! A girl may take back her promise if she will, and there is no law to make her marry when she does not choose!"
He tightened his clasp on her wrists till she sobbed with pain, and bent his dark face, distorted with demoniac rage, close to hers, hissing:
"And with the poor excuse that there is no law against it, you break a human heart and wreck a human life as ruthlessly as you would trample a flower springing in your path. Are you not afraid?"
"Afraid—of what?" she murmured, uneasily; and her fair face, as the moonlight gleamed on it down through the leaves, was ghastly with sudden fear.
"Of—me!" he answered, with a mocking laugh that made her very blood run cold, as he continued: "I am tempted to kill you for your falsity, but not yet!—that is, I will wait till I see how things turn out. Perhaps," mockingly, "you will tell me if you expect to marry Lovelace Ellsworth?"
She faltered:
"No; he is engaged to my cousin."
"Are you speaking the truth?"
"Yes," she sobbed, nervously.