Her lips curled.
“Have you nothing better than that to say for yourself? Have you no reparation to offer me?” she asked.
And he answered, coldly:
“None!”
“George,” she cried, in agony, “think how I have loved you, how I have trusted you! Can you let me suffer thus and show me no pity?”
“My pity could do you no practical good now,” he answered, carelessly.
“And you will not right the wrong—you will not cover my shame?”
“I cannot,” he still repeated.
“George Sumner, you do not know the bitter, cruel wrong that you are doing. Ah, Heaven! why was I so blind, so mad that I did not see and realize it myself? You do not once dream of the misery you are entailing upon future generations,” she cried, with clasped hands upraised in agony, as she remembered her father in his pride, and the will of the previous marquis, and knew that unless she became a lawful wife the entail would be cut off from that branch of their family, her father’s hopes forever destroyed, and herself irretrievably disgraced; and yet with a strange perversity she would not tell the man who had betrayed her of her position, when she knew it was that alone he desired, and not herself or her love.
She would rather die than marry him and lift him to the position he craved, and know all the time that she was an unloved wife, a despised stepping-stone to his ambition.