She gave a slight sigh of impatience. “If I must listen to you——” And yet she felt that in her mind there was no alternative.
“More depends upon it than you imagine,” he replied coolly. “You shall not be kept long; I, too, am busy.”
He placed a chair for her, and, with an annoying consciousness of submission, she sat down. A sense of her old fear and dislike of the man was creeping over her, and, giving her greater uneasiness still, the subduing sense of his dominant will. It was fortunate, she thought, that she had to act only on the defensive. Still, it might afford a chance of divining the enemy’s tactics.
“I had,” he began, as he stood before her in the manifest consciousness of power in will and brain, “to come in here under a false name; not merely because I doubted your receiving me, but because Paul Gastineau is to the world still dead, at least for some time longer. So much for myself; I do not want you, of all women, to think of me as a trickster. Now, to the point of my errand. You are going—you must make allowances for my bluntness, time presses and I am a fighting man rather than a diplomatist,—you are going to marry Geoffrey Herriard, very soon; but sooner or later is immaterial. I have come,—forgive me,—to tell you that you must not marry him.”
“Why not?” The question was put quietly. Alexia was surprised at her own self-possession.
Gastineau’s eyes seemed to burn upon her now. “Because,” he answered steadily, “he has stolen, or, at least, appropriated you from me.”
“No, no,” she protested, meeting his gaze defiantly. “That is absurd. You have no right to say that.”
“Then,” he rejoined, with his cunning smile, “because I love you.”
“Oh!” Alexia rose with an exclamation of annoyance. “Mr. Gastineau, is that persecution to begin again?”
His face was set with the suggestion of purpose. “There will be no persecution on my part,” he replied darkly. “I trust we are respectively too sensible to practise or to court it. All I am here for now is to enlighten you, the woman I love with all my soul and strength, as to the true position in which you stand, in a word, to prevent your taking the shadow for the substance.”