Ah! if the man could have seen the white, set face concealed among the draperies so near him—if he could have caught the deadly gleam that shone with tiger-like fury in Anna Goddard's dusky eyes—he never would have dared to face her again after giving utterance to those maddening words.
"It strikes me, Mr. Goddard, that it is rather late—after twenty years—to make such an acknowledgment to me," Isabel Stewart retorted, with quiet irony.
"I know it—I feel it now," he responded, in accents of despair. "I know that I forfeited both your love and respect when I began to yield to the charms and flatteries of Anna Correlli. She was handsome, as you know; she began to be fond of me from the moment of our introduction; and when, in an unguarded moment, I revealed the—the fact that you were not my wife, she resolved that she would supplant you—"
"Yes, 'the woman—she gavest me and I did eat,'" interposed his companion, with a scathing ring of scorn in the words. "That is always the cry of cowards like you, when they find themselves worsted by their own folly," she went on, indignantly. "Woman must always bear the scorpion lash of blame from her betrayer while the world also awards her only shame and ostracism from society, if she yields to the persuasive voice of her charmer, admiring and believing in him and allowing him to go unsmirched by the venomous breath of scandal. It is only his victim—his innocent victim oftentimes, as in my case—who suffers; he is greeted everywhere with open arms and flattering smiles, even though he repeats his offenses again and again."
"Isabel! spare me!"
"No, I will not spare you," she continued, sternly. "You know, Gerald Goddard, that I was a pure and innocent girl when you tempted me to leave my father's house and flee with you to Italy. You were older than I, by eight years; you had seen much of the world, and you knew your power. You cunningly planned that secret marriage, which you intended from the first should be only a farce, but which, I have learned since, was in every respect a legal ceremony—"
"Ha! I thought so!" cried her companion, with a sudden shock. "When did you hear?—who told you?"
"I met your friend, Will Forsyth, only two years ago—just before my return to this country—and when I took him to task for the shameful part which he had played to assist you in carrying out your ignominious plot, telling him that you had owned to his being disguised as an aged minister to perform the sacrilegious ceremony, he confessed to me that, at the last moment, his heart had failed him, whereupon he went to an old clergyman, a friend of his father, revealed everything, and persuaded him to perform the marriage in a legal manner; and thus, Gerald Goddard, I became your lawful wife instead of your victim, as you supposed."
"Yes, I know it. Forsyth afterward sent me the certificate and explained everything to me," the man admitted, with a guilty flush. "I received the paper about a year after the report of your death."
"Ah! that could not have been very gratifying to—your other—victim," remarked Mrs. Stewart, with quiet sarcasm.