She had started up now, and we faced each other. Boiling with indignation, I could restrain myself no longer—the pent-up volcano broke beyond bound, and almost before I knew what I was doing I had started in to vent my ill-humor on the dog that had stolen my bone.
“Remember! How can I ever forget? In those days long ago didn’t that fellow with his mocking, handsome face always stir the green-eyed monster in my heart? Haven’t I groaned many a time when afloat to think with what ghoulish glee he said to me at my wedding, ‘Never mind, he laughs best who laughs last;’ and how I’ve hated him all these months God only knows. Don’t you think I could pick him out among ten thousand and know his cold-blooded laugh if I heard it in the blackness of a dungeon. I tell you hate has eyes and ears, where other senses might be blind and deaf. So I say it was very strange I didn’t discover him at the alcalde’s; we might have had it out then and there, instead of putting it off for the future.”
“Morgan,” she exclaimed, jumping up with a flutter of garments, and an eagerness that was not assumed, “tell me, who is it you think I have been speaking about, this man you hate and mean to fight—tell me, sir, at once.”
There was a touch of the old-time despotism in her manner, but I paid little heed to that.
“There is but one man on earth who could cause me to make such a fool of myself, and his name is—Hilary Tempest.”
There, I had uttered it now—hurled the bomb that was to create such consternation.
It did produce remarkable results, although hardly of the nature I had expected.
Hildegarde uttered a sound—really it was very like a little laugh.
She had drawn my teeth; she knew my weakness, knew that I still cared for her—and she laughed at me, mocked me.
It was exasperatingly humiliating.