And now, although she could not hear what was being said, she suddenly recognized, with a pang of agony that made her gasp for breath, the voice of her husband in earnest conversation with the woman who had been her guest two nights previous.
As noiselessly as a cat creeps after her prey, Anna Goddard stole across that spacious apartment and concealed herself among the voluminous folds of the draperies, where she found that she could easily hear all that was said.
"You are very hard, Isabel," she heard Gerald Goddard remark, in a reproachful voice.
"I grant you that," responded the liquid tones of his companion, "as far as you and—that woman are concerned, I have no more feeling than a stone."
At those words, "that woman," spoken in accents of supreme contempt, the eyes of Anna Goddard began to blaze with a baneful gleam.
"And you will never forgive me for the wrong I did you so long ago?" pleaded the man, with a sigh.
"What do you mean by that word 'forgive?'" coldly inquired Mrs. Stewart.
"Pardon, remission—as Shakespeare has it, 'forgive and quite forget old faults,'" returned Gerald Goddard, in a voice tremulous with repressed emotion.
"Forget!" repeated the beautiful woman, in a wondering tone.
"Ah, if you could," eagerly cried her visitor; then, as if he could control himself no longer, he went on, with passionate vehemence: "Oh, Isabel! when you burst upon me, so like a radiant star, the other night, and I realized that you were still in the flesh, instead of lying in that lonely grave in far-off-Italy—when I saw you so grandly beautiful—saw how wonderfully you had developed in every way, all the old love came back to me, and I realized my foolish mistake of that by-gone time as I had never realized it before."