“He believed that he had bitter cause to hate me,” she answered, and the pallor of her face was for a moment superseded by a fiery blush of shame.
Bayard Lorraine could only ask again, in wonder:
“But why?”
The crimson on her face grew deeper, and she bowed her head very low as she answered, with a sudden calmness born of great despair:
“You remember the newspaper clipping which I asked you to use as the basis for a novel, Bayard? You remember the poor working girl who was deceived into marrying a wicked wretch, and who fled from him in the very hour of the marriage? I am the unhappy girl, and this man is the one I married. You see, he did not commit suicide. He lived to tear me from you, my darling. That statement was untrue, like much of the newspaper reports, for, oh, my dear love, I—I never went astray; I only disappeared, because dear Mrs. Howard, the good angel of my life, adopted me and took me away from New York.”
He was looking at her with a face of stone, turning almost rigid with horror; but she did not wait for him to speak; she went on with feverish rapidity, anxious to confess all, now that she had undertaken the task:
“I will not keep anything back from you now, Bayard. I was the girl whose life you saved and whom you have told me since you loved and would have married. I loved you, too, and it was on that love that they played when they persuaded me to marry the wretch, who pretended to be your cousin. When I found out how cruelly I had been deceived, and that I would never see you again, as I had hoped, I was crazed with horror. I—oh——”
She broke off with a shriek of horror, for Bayard Lorraine had drawn a long, gasping breath, closed his eyes, and now lay before her like one dead.
Mrs. Howard had been listening in wrathful horror, dazed and indignant at the duplicity of the girl she had loved and trusted. At that shriek, she confronted Fair with eyes that blazed with anger, crying out bitterly:
“You wicked, cruel girl, you have killed him! How dared you tell him that story in his weak condition? He will never recover from the shock. Get up and go to your room, for he will never want to look on your face again.”