“I think I understand you,” she returned, with a disdainful coldness which made him rage inwardly, “and can save you the trouble of inflicting upon me a repetition of a story which I have already heard.”
“Ah!” He seemed nettled at his forestalling. “So the famous Geoffrey Herriard has been clever enough to see the desirability of making a clean breast of his position before he was found out, and has confessed that his cleverness has been borrowed—like his career—from another man’s brains, eh? He has told you?”
“Everything.”
Gastineau’s face relaxed into a sneering smile. “I am sorry to hear that, since it means that he has broken his word of honour, a solemn promise made to me to whom he owes everything.”
“I should think,” Alexia said quietly, “his course was justified.”
He glanced at her sharply, and saw through her words that she knew all. “No doubt,” he rejoined, “he would try to justify it, but we need scarcely stay to argue that point. What I ask you to realize is the fact that you are rejecting the real man in favour of his empty mask.”
“I do not accept your estimate of Mr. Herriard,” she replied curtly.
He seemed charged with the magnetism of a supreme, coercive will, yet her coldness always held him at bay. He could scarcely hope to argue successfully against that baffling attitude of dislike.
“I wish,” he continued, schooling his face and manner to an insinuating humility, “that you would try to find it in your heart to entertain a more favourable estimate of me. Alexia,” he went on passionately, tactfully taking no more than a step forward as he saw her shrink from his advance, “let me call you once by that name, if it is the last time; Alexia, why can you not love me? What, in Heaven’s name, is the curse upon me that gives hate in return where I have beggared myself for love? Alexia,” he urged, with a passion that now was genuine enough, “tell me, as one human soul speaking to another, what there is in me that repels you, you of all women, the last in the world whom I could have imagined rejecting substance for shadow. Tell me, even though it be to my utter despair, tell me the truth, why do you so hate me?”
He was bending forward, his face working, his eyes avidly pleading, his body quivering betwixt infinite desire and intense restraint. Before him Alexia stood like one at bay before a crouching tiger, desperate yet unflinching. Perhaps had she not added the indication of courage to beauty it might have lessened the deadliness of the attack. As it was, she could meet his eyes and answer steadily: