"You drive me mad with your strange answers," wailed Mrs. Gordon. "Will no one make her speak and tell me my child's fate?"
She looked around helplessly into their wondering faces. St. Leon stood white and moveless as a marble statue, his arms folded tightly over his broad breast, his pale brow beaded with chilly drops of sweat, his eyes never turning from that kneeling figure. Mrs. Le Roy, overcome with agitation, had sunk upon her sofa gasping for breath. Maud Merivale gazed on the scene with a face of evil joy, and Mr. Gordon looked dazed, like one staggering under a horrible burden, but at his wife's piteous appeal he went slowly forward, and touched the arm of the convicted impostor.
"You hear," he said, "you are driving us mad with your evasions! Where is my daughter? Is she dead?"
A shudder ran through them all at that ominous word, but Laurel sprung to her feet suddenly, and faced him with an almost defiant gleam in her eyes. A dull red glow flared into her cheeks, and she drew her graceful figure haughtily erect as she extended one slender hand at the agitated speaker.
"Do you think that I have murdered her that you look at me so fiercely?" she cried. "Do you think I would harm one hair of her lovely golden head—she who was so kind to me in my desolation and despair? No, no, she is not dead, your daughter whom you tried to separate from her own true lover. She is well and happy. She is married to Cyril Wentworth, and gone abroad with him!"
"Married!" almost shrieked Mrs. Gordon, and her husband echoed, blankly, "Married!"
"Yes, she is married," Laurel answered, almost triumphantly. "She took her fate into her own hands, and sought happiness with her lover."
"Married to Cyril Wentworth! How dared she? how dared she?" Mrs. Gordon wailed aloud, in frantic anger.
And Laurel looking at her gravely, answered with unconscious pathos: