“You met there a young lady by the name of Miss Stella Gladstone?”
Lord Carrol started as from a sudden shock, and grew pale to his lips.
“Stella Gladstone! What can you tell me of Star Gladstone?” he demanded, hoarse from emotion.
“That her heart is broken—her life ruined,” Ralph Meredith answered, sternly, for he knew now that he had found his man, and he meant to show him no mercy.
He trembled with excitement, and his fingers ached to strangle the villain and coward who had so basely betrayed the trust of the loveliest woman on earth.
“Her life ruined! Don’t tell me that,” Lord Carrol whispered, with white lips, while the look of agony which leaped to his eyes would have moved the hardest heart, had it been less sore than Ralph Meredith’s.
“Yes, and you are the traitor who is accountable for it,” he answered, hotly.
The young man flushed, and he drew himself up with sudden dignity, struggling to regain his self-possession, which had been sadly disturbed at the mention of that dearly loved name.
“You forget yourself, sir,” he said, haughtily. “What right have you to address me thus? Why do you speak to me in this way of Miss Gladstone, and arraign me for what you assert?”
“Why should I not?” Ralph Meredith demanded, in low, fierce tones. “Did she not tell me with her own lips of your baseness and treachery? And do you think that I can take the hand of the man, were he twice a lord, who has ruined the life of”—“the only woman whom I ever loved,” he was about to add, but something restrained him and made him substitute—“an angel?”