“No, I came upon business with Lord Norton. I never dreamed of finding you here. Where have you been all these long—these endless years? Where is our child? Oh, Virgieseamstresses how can you stand there like that, so cold, so relentless, when you think of that bond between us?”
“But—there is between us a barrier as relentless, as impassable as death!” she murmured, with quivering lips, while a film seemed gathering over her eyes, and her strength almost failed her.
Something in her tone and manner told Sir William, that she still loved him in spite of the misunderstanding of the past, and her present coldness, and his heart leaped with a sweet, new hope.
“Virgie, there is no barrier—there has never been any barrier save that which you yourself have interposed between us,” he said, eagerly, and venturing a step nearer to her.
Again she put out her hand to check him—that small, beautiful hand whose rosy finger-tips he had so loved to kiss in those old days.
“Your wife! your son!” she murmured, brokenly.
“I have no wife, Heaven help me!” he cried, the veins standing out full and hard upon his forehead. “What can you mean? I have no son.”
“Are they—dead?” she asked, lifting her eyes to his face for the first time since he had first confronted her.
“No,” he returned, briefly, trying to comprehend her meaning, for of course he never knew that she had seen his cousin’s boy and believed him his.
“No?” Virgie questioned, catching her breath quickly. Was it possible that the beautiful woman he had married had, after long years, discovered his treachery and forsaken him?