“And I answered you that you lied.”
“Ay, and on that you dismissed me—the word of the man whom you professed to love, the word of the man to whom you had given your trust weighing for naught with you.”
“When I gave you my trust,” she retorted, “I did so in ignorance of your true self, in a headstrong wilful ignorance that would not be guided by what all the world said of you and your wild ways. For that blind wilfulness I have been punished, as perhaps I deserved to be.”
“Lies—all lies!” he stormed. “Those ways of mine—and God knows they were none so wild, when all is said—I abandoned when I came to love you. No lover since the world began was ever so cleansed, so purified, so sanctified by love as was I.”
“Spare me this at least!” she cried on a note of loathing
“Spare you?” he echoed. “What shall I spare you?”
“The shame of it all; the shame that is ever mine in the reflection that for a season I believed I loved you.”
He smiled. “If you can still feel shame, it shall overwhelm you ere I have done. For you shall hear me out. Here there are none to interrupt us, none to thwart my sovereign will. Reflect then, and remember. Remember what a pride you took in the change you had wrought in me. Your vanity welcomed that flattery, that tribute to the power of your beauty. Yet, all in a moment, upon the paltriest grounds, you believed me the murderer of your brother.”
“The paltriest grounds?” she cried, protesting almost despite herself
“So paltry that the justices at Truro would not move against me.”