"You did," he persisted, rather cruelly and with an ultra-selfish motive.
"Infatuation," Desirée cried, "for the clean mask that he wore. But love?—Ah! no, can one love a sot, a beast?"
"Tell me," Dunvegan urged.
She caught her breath a few times helplessly in the stress of emotion, her eyes roving round the big store which held none but themselves. Her gaze stopped on Bruce's face. Her sentences came from her lips mechanically.
"I think his beauty and his old-world manners dazzled me," was her frank, pride-dissolving confession. "For the time I—I forgot you, Bruce. I imagined I cared more for the other. My indecision could not brook his mad wooing. For remember that change, absence, and pressure are the three things which convert any woman's will."
Desirée paused, a pleading for pity in her glance.
"I took refuge behind my vow," she continued after a second. "But that gave me no stability. If I would marry him, he promised to leave Oxford House immediately and join the Nor'westers. You see Ferguson had already approached him through Gaspard Follet."
"That," Dunvegan observed, "should have shown you his true character."
"I was blind," she lamented. "I deemed it sacrifice. In a way it was, I suppose. How could I know that the plan arranged by Ferguson through Gaspard Follet was the very thing that suited his evil intentions? He offered Edwin command of Brondel. I thought it safe enough to be the factor's wife in a post removed from Fort La Roche."
Bruce made a disdainful gesture. "Those messengers showed you how safe it was," he remarked acridly.