[CHAPTER XLII.]
He stood there in silence, looking down at that bowed head, veiled by its sweeping golden hair. He made no effort to raise her; he answered not a word to her wild appeal. There was a smoldering fire in his dark eyes, a stern compression of his lips, that boded ill for the granting of her prayer.
He had received a terrible shock. His love and his pride alike had been outraged, and in his case it was a strong love and a strong pride. The wound to both was accordingly all the greater.
His strange silence grew terrible to her. She lifted her face a little and looked at him, recoiling from the terrible indignation in his eyes as if he had struck her a blow.
"St. Leon, speak to me," she wailed. "Oh, you will not be hard and unforgiving to me! I have wronged you and deceived you, I know; but it was all because I loved you. No woman ever loved with so mad a love as I have given you. If I had not loved you so dearly, I had not dared so much."
He spoke then. There was concentrated passion, burning contempt, in his deep and angry voice.
"Do not speak of love!" he said. "I can fancy with what love the drunken journalist's daughter, the poor clerk's runaway fiancé, could love St. Leon Le Roy. I can imagine that the temptation to lift yourself to my level from the dust where you groveled was too strong for you. I can fancy that the greed for wealth and honor led you astray. But love—faugh! If one spark of that divine passion had burned in your scheming breast, you would have respected the unsullied honor, the proud old name of the Le Roys—you would have spared me the disgraceful alliance with a drunkard's daughter!"
Slow, cruel, bitter, every word fell like a coal of fire on her bleeding heart. Was it the gifted father, the brilliant genius whom she had loved and revered despite his weakness, who was thus stigmatized as a drunkard by her husband's lips? Had that father's sin indeed set her apart as a mark for the finger of scorn to point at, a creature too low to even lift her eyes to the proud and rich St. Leon Le Roy? It was a cruel, a bitter insult. It rankled like a sword point in her heart.
She rose slowly to her feet and faced him with a strange, new-born dignity that sat gracefully on her perfect beauty. She did not speak, but waited with drooping head and tightly folded hands for his further words.