Mrs. Varian gave a convulsive start and looked fearfully at the speaker.
His blue eyes met hers full with a commanding expression, as he continued:
“Paulina, in meeting my daughter here on my dying bed she has demanded to know the details of the feud as she believes it, that shadowed so darkly the last three years of her young life. Once I would have died to shield her from such sorrow, but now she declares that certainty of sorrow is better than the pangs of suspense. She demands the truth. It is our bitter duty to yield to her desires.”
A hushed murmur of surprise went around the group, and Cinthia buried her face on Madame Ray’s bosom.
She had indeed pleaded with her father for the truth, and he had promised to gratify her wish, though she wondered why he added:
“There was indeed a terrible reason why you could not marry Arthur, my dear child, and it would have killed you at first to know it, but now that you love another man, and are engaged to marry him, you will not mind so much.”
They had startled her strangely, those words, and she hung tremblingly on every sentence that fell now from her father’s lips, and before she hid her pallid face she had seen Arthur draw his chair close to his mother’s side—the mother he loved so dearly still, though she had parted him so cruelly from his beautiful betrothed.
Again Everard Dawn breathed through pallid, pain-drawn lips:
“All I ask of you, Paulina, is that you shall tell your side of our marriage and divorce. I will follow with my version of the story.”
The listeners could scarcely express outcries of surprise.