“Get up, Molly Trueheart, do not kneel at my feet, for she speaks the truth!” he exclaimed, hoarsely. “Such a marriage would not stand in law. I am therefore free of you, as Miss Barry has just told you.”
A shriek of mortal agony rang through the house; as Molly sprang upward and stood before the handsome, angry man she loved, with an awful corpse-like anguish on her girlish face. Her dark eyes clung to his face despairingly, and she trembled like a wind-blown leaf.
No one spoke or moved, so intensely was the interest of all concentrated on those two central figures—the outraged husband and the agonized young wife. Ere her cry of anguish had ceased to re-echo through the room, she wailed out, sharply, supplicatingly:
“You will forgive me, Cecil, you will make me your wife, in truth, as I—thought I was. Oh, I can not bear this shame! I sinned through my love of you, and my remorse has been so great that I have never known one happy hour. But you loved me, Cecil, and you can not unlearn your love so soon. You will make me your wife?”
Such tears as fell from her eyes were hot enough to blister the fair face, such pain as racked her heart was enough to atone for her sin, but the outraged husband was wild with wrath, and he answered in that voice of smoldering fury and indignant pride:
“Why, you are John Keith’s divorced wife. You were bound to him when you went through that farce of a marriage with me. Ah, I see through it all now, but I can not understand how you duped him, so as to get away with me, and then secure your divorce from him. I—”
“Hush, you shall not accuse me of that,” she interrupted, wildly. “There stands the heartless woman who broke poor John Keith’s heart. She is his divorced wife,” pointing an accusing finger at handsome Louise Barry.
The magnificent-looking beauty lifted her hands and eyes to heaven with an expressive shrug of her graceful shoulders.
“Heavens, what a false and wicked creature!” she exclaimed. “Aunt Thalia, you have Aunt Lucy’s letter telling you of Molly Trueheart’s entanglement with John Keith although we did not know it had gone as far as a secret marriage.”
“Yes, I have the letter. Here, Cecil, read it,” exclaimed Mrs. Barry, thrusting it into his hand.