The cool, insolent assertion fell on Captain Ernscliffe's ears like a thunderbolt. He staggered back and stared at the calm, smiling villain in wonder mingled with indefinable dread.
"My God!" he muttered, half to himself, "you would not make such an assertion unless you could prove it."
"I can prove every assertion I have made," was the confident reply. "Queenie Lyle ran away with me the day her mother and sisters went to Europe. She lived with me nearly a year. I can prove this, remember."
"You married her!" gasped his adversary, his eyes starting, his face as white as death.
Leon Vinton looked at that pale, anguish-stricken face, and laughed aloud, the mocking laugh of a fiend.
"Married her?" he asked, sneeringly. "Oh, no, I am not one of the marrying kind. She knew that, but she loved me, and was content to live with me on my own terms."
There was a blank silence. Captain Ernscliffe dimly felt that the agony he was enduring was commensurate with the pains of hell.
Leon Vinton enjoyed his misery to the utmost.
"We lived together a year," he went on, after a moment. "At first we were very loving and very happy, but well—you know how such cases always terminate—we wearied of each other. She was a spit-fire and a termagant. She pushed me into the river and tried to drown me. She thought she had succeeded, and ran away home. Her family kept her fatal secret, and married her off to you."