“You will not,” she answered, with a determined wink. “I have taken care of that.”
“You have left it to me.”
For a moment she was silent; then a light broke upon her, and she spoke quickly.
“Alfred,” she said, “I know now why you put your name in my will without mentioning the relationship in which I supposed you stood to me, and why you did not put my name in yours, but only said that you left everything to your wife. You were deliberately insulting me, and deceiving me most cruelly even then, on the day I thought most sacred.”
“I thought you were fond of me,” he said, as if he had not heard her last speech. For a moment she could not answer him. Only a few hours before, and the deceptions of which she had known him then to be guilty had but made him dearer to her. She had loved him with all her own strength, and supposed him to possess it. She had idealized him with her own goodness, till she had mistaken it for his. It had never occurred to her that any comfort she gathered in through him was but her own feeling returning to soothe her a little with its beauty. Now all the glamour had vanished, she loathed and shrank from him, just as he had done from her. It was like a death agony.
“I was fond of you,” she said. “I loved you more than all the world, and I would have given you my life, I would have worked for your daily bread. I wanted nothing in the world but you, Alfred; but I am undeceived. You must go; you must leave me, and at once. I have desired Jane to pack your things——”
“I shall stay,” he said, in a tone that made her look up quickly. “I do not mean to go until I have the money that old Rammage has left you.”
“You will not have one penny piece of it,” she answered.
“I will,” he said, with a quiet, determined look she knew well in his dull eyes. “He has left it to you, and you have left it to me. I mean to have it.”
“It is no use trying to intimidate me, Alfred,” she said; “it is too late. To-morrow I shall make another disposition of my property.”