She was beautiful beyond comparison when she faced him in her indignation, defending her absent lover, and resenting the insult offered to herself; he had never seen her so spirited before, and it lent an added charm to her fascinations, while he was filled with impotent rage that he was powerless to awaken any feelings in her heart for him, save those of scorn and contempt.
“Why should he win?” he cried within himself, as he marked Geoffrey’s air of tender proprietorship; “he who has not even a name to offer her, while I, who am heir to the proud escutcheon of Mapleson, and to a double fortune, perhaps a triple one, if he never discovers who he is, am able to excite nothing but aversion and contempt. I swear I will not submit to it, and I will find some way to part them, even now. He has crossed my path too many times. I have never forgiven him on the old score, and I will never forgive him for being an interloper in my race.”
All this was in his mind as he stood close beside the young bride-elect, while waiting for Mr. Loring’s carriage, and some evil spirit possessed him to assail her again.
“Miss Huntress,” he whispered, so close to her ear that no one could possibly hear him in the tumult around them, “doubtless you have heard that old saying. ‘There is many a slip ’twixt cup and lip.’”
Gladys never noticed him by so much as a glance. She might have been some beautiful statue, and deaf to all sounds, for any evidence that she gave of having heard him. And yet he knew she could not have failed to catch every word that he had uttered.
His blood began to boil at being thus ignored.
“Do you imagine that I shall tamely submit to see another man win you, and he so far beneath you? It shall never be!”
Gladys turned at this, and looked straight into his eyes, and actually smiled—a smile that drove him almost to a frenzy; it was like a winter’s sunbeam reflected from ice—sharp, dazzling, chilling.
“The future tense is not applicable in this case, Mr. Mapleson,” she retorted, in as icy a tone, while the air with which she settled her small hand more firmly within her lover’s arm plainly said, “I am already won!”
Everet Mapleson ground his teeth in baffled rage. It was evident that in an open battle Miss Huntress was too much for him.