“You may cry, or you may laugh, but it will not alter your fate in the least,” he growled. “I have promised Harold Castello that you will marry him in a week, and you shall do it. Dare to defy me further, or to refuse obedience to my will, and I will punish you, even if you are in Cecil Grant’s very arms!”
“Would that I were!” she moaned, in terror, and, with a stifled imprecation, he left the room.
The strength of a desperate terror came to Violet when she was left alone. She walked up and down the room, wringing her little hands in despair, sobbing under her breath:
“I understand all now. I know why that fiend would force me into an abhorred marriage with himself! Oh, that fatal secret! that fatal secret! Why did it ever become mine? How shall I save myself when that doting old man, who ought to protect me, is leagued with my enemy to wreck my life? Amid all this luxury, I am friendless. Oh, Cecil, Cecil! if I could only see you for one short hour!”
CHAPTER X.
“LOVE’S SEAL IS SET UPON ME.”
Although Judge Camden was very proud of the offer he had received for Violet’s hand, he might not have insisted upon its acceptance so strongly had he not been determined to thwart her marriage to Cecil Grant.
The judge had a secret spite against Cecil’s mother that influenced him in rejecting the young man’s suit for Violet.
Mrs. Grant was a handsome widow, the descendant of a very aristocratic race, but impoverished by the war between the States, and struggling under a load of debt and worry. The ancestral estates were almost hopelessly mortgaged, and her only son, Cecil, a newly fledged lawyer, was barely able to keep up the interest and maintain his mother in simple style from his earnings and the small revenue from the stock and lands.
Judge Camden was a self-made man, very rich, and with the arrogant pride peculiar to that class of people. He fell in love with his neighbor, the poor, proud, but charming widow, and offered her his hand.
His proposal was politely, gently, but firmly rejected, and the old judge never forgave her for the slight.