Her words, her tone, her looks, were simply maddening to him, and he turned to her with a gesture of passionate appeal.
“Mollie! Mollie! Don’t speak to me in that tone; don’t condemn me utterly; don’t annihilate me quite with your scornful eyes,” he pleaded in a voice that was almost shrill from mingled rage and wounded feeling. “I did not tell you that I knew Clifford Faxon—I withheld all information regarding him because I—I was jealous of him.”
“Jealous! Why, Phil!” exclaimed the startled girl, her look of scorn and indignation merged into one of undisguised amazement.
“Yes; furiously, madly jealous of him,” Philip hotly returned, every pulse in his body beating like trip-hammers, while he recklessly threw all discretion to the winds, “for, Mollie, I love you, and it drove me wild to have to listen to your enthusiastic praises of that low-born fellow; to be told that you had given him the ring which I had coveted—which I had begged of you, and you had refused to bestow upon me.
“Darling, have you not suspected this,” he went on, forgetting for the moment everything save the fact that he loved her with all the passion of his nature, and must win some response from her or go mad, “have you not seen that you are more to me than all the world? Do you not know that I have always loved you? Have you forgotten how, when we were children playing together under the elms on the banks of the Hudson, I vowed that I should always love you, and that when we grew up I should claim you?
“Forgive me for deceiving you about Faxon,” he went on, with assumed humility, for he realized that he must eat humble pie before she would pardon his duplicity; “of course I knew, when you were telling me about that railway accident, of whom you were speaking; but some perverse little devil held me silent, and now I am found out and punished for it. Dearest, tell me that you forgive me, and that you return my love; for, Mollie, from the moment we met, after your return, all the old-time affection revived with a hundredfold intensity, and—and I just cannot live without you.”
He had gradually drawn nearer her while speaking, and now, seizing her hands, drew them to his breast and held them there, while he searched the sweet, down-cast, but very grave, face before him.
She had flushed crimson when he began to pour forth his torrent of love; then the color had gradually receded, leaving her pale and with an expression of mingled pain and perplexity on her face.
For a moment they sat thus, and not a word was spoken. Then Mollie lifted her head and looked her lover full in the eye, her own seeming to search his very soul.