“The cruelty of the treatment accorded Florian Gay transcends your coquetry with young Merrington. I can find no fitting words to describe your conduct. Besides, you have just said you would not permit me to scold you. So it only remains for me to say that I fear a girl who flirts so shamelessly before marriage could not refrain from it afterwards. I could not trust and respect her as my wife.”
No answer from Viola, crouching speechless in her chair, and he continued, sadly but firmly:
“These are bitter words, and I regret the bitter occasion for them, but—Miss Van Lew, I can never be your husband!”
The listening statue started into indignant, palpitating life.
“Oh, Heaven! you would break faith with me now, at the last hour—expose me to open shame! A jilted bride!”
“Forbid the thought,” he answered, quickly. “On my head fall all the obloquy. You can tell the world that we quarreled bitterly this evening, and that you refused to marry me. That will clear up everything. No one,” bitterly, “will discredit this new proof of Miss Van Lew’s fickleness and heartlessness and love of sensation.”
He waited a moment for the silent, statue-like figure to speak, but from the tense white lips came not a word, either of blame or of entreaty, so with a slight, cold bow, Philip Desha passed from her presence out into the cold March night, as Florian Gay had done but a little while before, his heart as crushed and heavy as Florian’s own, but true to his high ideals of noble womanhood.
Viola did not move from her chair for fifteen minutes. She sat still as a statue, the only sign of life in her gleaming, dark eyes, where pride and despair alternately struggled for expression.
It was the bitterest and most tragic hour her brilliant life had ever known.