"Mr. Goddard! what is the meaning of this strange language? You have no right to address me thus; it is an insult to me—a wicked wrong against your wife—"
"My wife!" the man burst forth, mockingly, and with a strangely bitter laugh.
A frown contracted his brow, and his lips were compressed into a vindictive line, as he again bent toward the fair girl.
"I do not love her," he said, hoarsely; "she has killed all my affection for her by her infernally variable moods, her jealousy, her vanity, and her inordinate passion for worldly pleasure, to the exclusion of all home responsibilities. Moreover—"
"I must not listen to you! Oh! let me go!" cried Edith, in a voice of distress.
Before Edith was aware of his intention, he bent his lips close to her face, and whispered something, in swift sentences, that made her shrink from him with a sudden cry of mingled pain and dismay, and cover her ears with her pretty hands.
"I do not believe it!" she panted; "oh! I cannot believe it. I am sure you do not know what you are saying, Mr. Goddard."
Her words appeared to arouse him to a sense of the fact that he was compromising himself most miserably in her estimation.
"No, I don't suppose you can," he muttered, a half-dazed expression on his face; "and I've no business to be telling you any such things. But, all the same, I am very fond of you, pretty one, and I do not believe this is any place for you. You are too fair and sweet to serve a woman with such a disposition as madam possesses, and I wish you would leave her when we go back to the city. I know you are poor, and have no friends upon whom you can depend; but I would settle a comfortable annuity upon you, so that you could be independent, and make a pretty little home for your—"
"How dare you talk to me like this? Do you think I have no pride—no self-respect?" Edith demanded, as she haughtily threw back her proud head and confronted the man with blazing eyes.