“Another?” she echoed, faintly.
“My cousin Fred loves you madly,” Arthur went on hoarsely. “He is a noble fellow, with but few faults, and has a most lovable nature. Oh, Cinthia, it would make me almost happy if he could win your heart and make you—my cousin.”
He paused, and Cinthia uttered one strangling gasp of surprise and pain, and was silent.
But in that moment the whole bright, sunny world seemed to go under a pall of inky blackness. The birds seemed to cease their singing, the flowers faded and turned to ashes, the last hope, for now she knew that she had always cherished a faint, piteous hope, seemed to die in her heart.
She would have liked to shriek aloud in her pain and shame, like one who felt herself falling down, down, down into a bottomless gulf.
Now she knew indeed that Arthur’s love had been of little worth. It was dead, dead—or he could never plead with her the cause of another.
She felt as if she must faint in the extremity of her agony, but she made a terrible effort to rally her strength and courage, and the next moment she heard her own voice laughing hollowly, like a thing apart from herself.
“I have amused you,” Arthur cried.
“Yes, very much,” she replied, laughing more and more, as if at some great joke.
In fact, she could not stop herself. She was on the border of an hysterical outbreak.