"Yes, I thought so too, for a little while, under the glamour of your beauty and my own loneliness, but when you were gone, I found that I was mistaken. I am here to tell you this. Can you forgive me, Maud?" he blunders out, with all the shame of a man who feels himself placed in an uncomfortable position.
"Mistaken!" she cries, transfixing him with the angry gleam of her blue eyes. "Why, only the last time we met you said that you loved me."
Vane, rather red and ashamed, still holds his ground bravely.
"I was mistaken, as I told you just now," he says. "I do not, I cannot love you."
"Cannot!" she repeats, a little blankly.
"I cannot," he answers. "I find in the light of my later experiences that I never really loved you, not even when I was about to make you my wife. I was under the spell of your beauty. I know now that my heart was untouched."
"What do you mean by later experience?" the beautiful woman asks, sneeringly.
"I mean that the love I feel now, when too late, for my lost wife, Reine, is the only love my heart can ever know," he answers, speaking low and reverentially, as if in the presence of the dead.
The cold blue eyes of the beautiful heiress kindle with pride and resentment.
"You expect me to believe this?" she cries, hotly. "Do I not know how you despised Reine Langton! How you called her vixen, spit-fire, scold! How you longed to be out of her presence and rid of her?"