"You prate of God's vengeance," he said, sneeringly, "but it suits you to forget that the preachers call him also a God of mercy, and love, and forgiveness!"
"Forgiveness!" she echoed, wildly. "Neither God nor man could forgive you, Leon Vinton! You have committed an unpardonable sin. You have broken my heart, you have tried to kill my soul, you murdered me! Can I ever forgive this?"
She swept back the golden waves of hair that shaded her white brow and showed him the livid scar of a deep wound beneath them.
"It is your hellish work!" she said. "You ground your cruel boot-heel into the brow your false lips had kissed a thousand times; you strangled my life out with the hands that had caressed me uncounted times! Oh, my God, can I ever forgive or forget my wrongs?"
"I will kill you the next time more surely, curse you!" he hissed, in ungovernable rage, and striding forward, he caught her white arm rudely, almost crushing it in his iron grasp. "Cease, girl, not another word!"
She wrenched herself out of his grasp and answered, defiantly:
"Let me go, then, if you cannot bear my reproaches. Let me return to my husband."
A sneer curled his thin lips as she spoke with an unconscious accent of tenderness on the words "my husband."
"Your husband, as you call him, shall never know that you are not mouldering yonder in Rose Hill Cemetery. You shall never look upon his face again, Queenie Lyle."