“I will never do so again—that is—if you will always be like this,” he answered, feasting his eager eyes on the rare beauty of the face that lay against his breast, his tone almost pleading in its earnestness.
She lifted her head and looked into his eyes with a shadowed gaze.
“How can I promise you?” she asked, half resentfully, half sadly. “You do not make due allowance for me, Norman; yet you know well the miserable doubt of your love that turns me sometimes into a fury. How can I be quite, quite sure of your heart, remembering, as I do every hour of my life, that I am quite thirteen years older than you, and that the royal dower my father gave me might have tempted many a man to forget that disparity.”
There was sudden, swift anguish in his face and voice, bitter pain and humiliation in the tone with which he cried:
“Oh, my love, that old complaint again—and so soon, so cruelly soon! You do injustice to yourself and your own charms. It was yourself that won me, not your splendid dowry. For those few years between us, bah! I never remember them unless you remind me. If I had been Cophetua and you the beggar maid, I should have implored you to share my throne.”
“But you were only a boy when you married me—barely twenty. By and by your fancy will change—you will repent.”
“Hush! you will be in hysterics presently,” he said, warningly. “Come with me, darling. You will forget these morbid fancies when you see the sweet little pet I have brought you.”
He drew her into a small anteroom adjoining, and she saw on a velvet sofa, fast asleep, a golden-haired little fairy.
“It is a little child I rescued from the wrecked train,” he said. “I brought her home with me until I could find her friends.”
To his amazement, her thin red lips began to curl into the cruelest sneer.