"You have not?" he sneered. "Did you not withhold from him the story of that year which he supposed you to have spent in Europe? Did you not allow him to think you an innocent woman?"
She sprang to her feet and stood facing him, her dark-blue eyes dilating, her cheeks flushing, her small hands clenched tightly in her breathless anger. An artist's pencil might have handed his name down to immortal fame could he have put on canvas that striking scene—the beautiful room, and the man in his splendid, insolent, satanic beauty, standing before that lovely incarnation of pride and passion, with her glorious veil of golden hair falling loosely about her superb form, and the shining folds of her costly bridal robe sweeping far behind her on the rich velvet carpet.
"I am an innocent woman," she said, proudly, and the light shone on her lifted face and the earnest fire in her eyes. "I am an innocent woman! I have done no wrong, though I am a betrayed, unhappy, and insulted victim! I have been sinned against, but I have not sinned!"
He laughed, cruelly, mockingly, insultingly.
"Why do you laugh?" she said. "You know that it is true. You deceived me and betrayed me, but was I to blame? I carried the marriage certificate in my breast as a precious thing! I thought it was true as Heaven, I thought I was pure as the snow! And I am! How could your sin touch me?"
Again he laughed mockingly.
"Your mind is strangely warped," he said. "But if you were innocent in the one thing, how about the blow in the dark? Was there no sin in that?"
"I deny that there was sin!" she said, with passionate defiance in her look and tone. "It was simple justice—'a blow for a blow.' You drove me mad with the horror and cruelty of all I learned! It seemed to me that I was given back from the grave to rid the world of a monster!"
"You failed," he said, derisively.
"Yes, to my sorrow," she answered. "But, ah! Leon Vinton, surely a day of reckoning will come to you. The justice of God will not always sleep. I was not permitted to take your punishment out of His hands who has said 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay.' It will come, it will come!"