"I think it would be injudicious to make a scene here," Emil Correlli replied, in a low tone, but with white lips, as he realized that the moment which he had so dreaded had come at last.
"What do you mean? Why do you act and speak as if you believed that mockery to be a reality?" exclaimed Edith, looking from one face to the other with wildly questioning eyes.
"Edith," began Mr. Goddard, in an impressive tone, "do you not know that you are this man's wife?—that the ceremony on yonder stage was, in every essential, a legal one, and performed by the Rev. Mr. —— of the —— church in Boston?"
"No! never! I do not believe it. They never would have dared do such a dastardly deed!" panted the startled girl, in a voice of horror.
Then drawing her perfect form erect, she turned with a withering glance to the craven at her side.
"Speak!" she commanded. "Have you dared to play this miserable trick upon me?"
Emil Correlli quailed beneath the righteous indignation expressed in her flashing glance; his eyes drooped, and conscious guilt was shown in his very attitude.
"Forgive me—I loved you so," he stammered, and—she was answered.
She threw out her hands in a gesture of repudiation and horror; she flashed one withering, horrified look into his face, then, with a moan of anguish, she swayed like a reed broken by the tempest, and would have fallen to the floor in her spotless robes had not Gerald Goddard caught her senseless form in his arms, and, lifting her by main strength, he bore her from the room and upstairs to her own chamber.