Gladys lifted her head haughtily.
“Mr. Mapleson,” she said, “I question your right to interrogate me in this authoritative manner, but if a plain answer will convince you that there can be no change in my decision, I am willing to acknowledge to you that I am pledged to another.”
“To Geoffrey Huntress?” Everet Mapleson demanded, hoarsely.
“Yes, to Geoffrey,” she repeated, with a tender intonation of the name that betrayed how dear it was to her.
At this confession the young man dropped the hand that he had clung to in spite of her efforts to release it, as if it had been a coal of fire, all the evil in his nature aroused by this triumph of his enemy over him.
“That low-born beggar!” he hissed.
“Sir!”
He shrank for an instant beneath the word as if she had smitten him. Then his passion swept all before it once more.
“He has opposed and thwarted me from the first moment of our meeting. He offered me an indignity once, which I have never forgotten or forgiven; he has robbed me of my honors at college and now he has robbed me of you! I—hate—him! and he shall yet feel the force of my hatred in a way to make him wish that he had never crossed my path.”