"Adeline," he impatiently repeated, "are you deceiving me? Did your father give you free liberty to choose between us?"
"Yes; he gave it me--after placing the whole case before me," she was obliged to answer.
"And you tell me that you have deliberately chosen de la Chasse? You give me no explanation; but cast me off like this?"
"I dare not give it. That is"--striving to soften the words that were wrung from her--"I have no explanation to give. Oh, Frederick, dearest Frederick--let me call you so in your presence, for the first and last and only time--do not reproach me? Indeed, I must marry him."
"Of your own free deliberation, you will, on Saturday next, walk to the altar and become his wife?" he reiterated. "Do you mean to tell me that?"
She made a gesture in the affirmative, her sobs rising hysterically. What with her confused state of feeling, and the anxiety she was under to preserve inviolate the obligation so solemnly undertaken, she was perhaps even less explanatory than she might have been. But who, in these moments of agitation, can act precisely as he ought?
"Fie upon you! fie upon you!" he cried, contemptuously. "You boast of loving! you may well do so, when you had two lovers to practise upon. I understand it all, now; your objection to my speaking, until the last moment, to M. de Castella; you would keep us both in your train, forsooth, incense to your vanity! You have but fooled me by pretending to listen to my love; you have led me on, and played with me, a slave to be sacrificed on his shrine! I give you up to him joyfully. I am well quit of you.
"Mercy! mercy!" she implored, shrinking down, and clasping her hands together.
"Fool that I was to be so deceived! Light and fickle that you are, you are not worthy to be enshrined in an honourable man's heart. I will thrust your image from mine, until not a trace, not a recollection of it, is left. I thank God it will be no impossible task. The spell that bound me to you is broken. Deceitful, worthless girl, thus to have betrayed your false heartedness at the last: but better for me to have discovered it before marriage than after. I thank you for this, basely treated as I have been."
She made an effort to interrupt him, a weak, broken-hearted effort; but his fierce torrent of speech overpowered it.