And she, the pauper, nameless, homeless, save for Wizard Hermann’s charity—would it not be monstrous ingratitude to refuse his prayer?
She faltered, recklessly:
“I will marry the man!”
CHAPTER XIV.
A LITTLE CONSPIRACY.
When the rash words had passed Leola’s lips a great trembling seized upon her, a horror of life she had never felt before, and she longed to scream out aloud to him that she must take back her promise—that she could not bind her beautiful, throbbing young life to oily, unctuous Giles Bennett, the man more than twice her age, and who in no way could be her fitting mate, not if he paid a million dollars instead of what he offered.
But when she saw Wizard Hermann’s radiant face, she dared not utter her passionate protest against being sold in the market like a beautiful Circassian slave to the highest bidder. She feared a fit of violence, or that he might fall down dead at her feet of the revulsion of feeling from relief to disappointment.
She restrained the words that ached in her throat, and leaned back, helplessly, in her chair, her eyes half shut, her face death-white, her senses reeling, and heard, half-consciously only, the profuse thanks he was pouring out, and the dazzling picture he was painting of her future as a rich man’s wife, even adding, consolingly, that the fat old man might drop off any day from apoplexy, and leave her a rich and happy young widow.
“Go, leave me,” she sighed, faintly, and he hurried out, nothing loath, to spread the good news.
The next thing Leola knew she was in bed again, and Miss Tuttle was reviving her with cold water on her face mixed with hot tears that fell from her own eyes.