"What can I say, woman?" he answers roughly. "What words are needed to emphasize the retribution of your sin to me? If you want money I will give it to you as freely as I would to any needy sufferer, as freely as I will give you pity and pardon; but why should I seek to moralize on your pitiful fate, to reproach you when Heaven has so terribly avenged my wrongs?"
"Heaven?" she interrupted, with a touch of the old fire in her thin wailing voice. "Where is Heaven? Heaven exists only when one is young and happy and healthy, free from care and sorrow when the sun is shining and the blood warm with hope and youth and love; with a body worn with disease, gnawed with want, and a soul sick with the sight of pain and misery and sin that never can be relieved, who can feel that there is a heaven? Ah, who can believe in heaven then, I ask? Come to my bedside every day Thomas Armstrong, with Bible, bell, and candle, whisper words of hope, of promise in my dying ears, and yet, if you speak with the tongue of an angel, and not of a man, you will not be able to lift the shroud from my soul, nor kindle one spark of heaven-born fire in my breaking heart. I defy you—I defy you!"
"Yet I will try."
"Too late, too late—you come too late!" she murmurs, her voice dying away in a dry choking sob.
He tries to utter some hackneyed refutation, but the commonplace words die on his lips, and a heavy silence follows as his eyes, in which all wrath and repugnance have now made way for pain and pity infinite, rest on the cowering wreck of womanhood whom he has loved with a love that comes to men of his metal only once in a life.
An angry curse, followed by a woman's coarse laugh, breaks the stillness. There is the sound of stumbling footsteps on the stairs, and the next moment the door is burst open, and a tall, gaunt-looking man, past the prime life, with dark gleaming eyes, and a thin chiseled face scarred with the ravages of fast living and squalid dissipation, stands on the threshold.
"Adelaide"—he speaks in a sweet thrilling voice that sounds so incongruous coming from the hard sensual mouth—"are you here? Quick, my girl—give me those deeds I left behind. I'm off to Antwerp in half an hour. Infernal run of luck throughout! I'll write for you when—Eh, whom have you here? Who is this?"—starting back with lowering brow when he catches sight of Armstrong's flaming face.
"I'll introduce you," says Addie rising quickly and turning to her husband. "This is, I believe, the only member of our estimable family whose acquaintance you have not yet made. My father, Colonel Lefroy—Mr. Armstrong of Kelvick."
But, before the words have left her mouth, Colonel Lefroy, with an angry oath, has disappeared, and is stumbling frantically down the stairs.
For fully two minutes Armstrong, with dazed face, remains staring at the spot where he stood; then he turns slowly to Addie.