Vaughan stood for a moment with his hand pressed to his brow. He hesitated. “I remember taking a paper in my hands,” he said slowly, his face flushing, as the probable inference from his words occurred to him. “But I was thinking so much of the disclosure you had made to me, and of the change it involved—-to me, that——”
“That you took no interest in the written details!” Sir Robert cried in a tone of bitter irony.
“I did not.”
“You did not read a word, I suppose?”
“I did not.”
Before the baronet could utter the sneer which was on his lips, Mary interposed. “I—I would like to go,” she murmured. “I feel rather faint!”
She detached herself from her father’s arm as she spoke, and with her face averted from her lover, she moved uncertainly towards the door. She had no wish to look on him. She shrank from meeting his shamed eyes. But something, either the feeling that she would never see him again, and that this was the end of her maiden love, or the desperate hope that even at this last moment he might explain his admission—and those facts, “confirmation strong as hell” which she knew, but which Sir Robert did not know—one or other of these feelings made her falter on the threshold, made her turn. Their eyes met.
He stepped forward impulsively. He was white with pain, his face rigid. For what pain is stronger than the pang of innocence accused?
“One moment!” he said, in an unsteady voice. “If we part so, Mary, we part indeed! We part forever! I said awhile ago that you must choose between us. And you have chosen—it seems,” he continued unsteadily. “Yet think! Give yourself, give me a chance. Will you not believe my word?” And he held out his arms to her. “Will you not believe that when I came to you this morning I thought you penniless? I thought you the unknown schoolmistress you thought yourself a week ago! Will you not trust me when I say that I never connected you with the missing daughter? Never dreamed of a connection? Why should I?” he added, in growing agitation as the words of his appeal wrought on himself. “Why should I? Or why do you in a moment think me guilty of the meanest, the most despicable, the most mercenary of acts?”
He was going to take her hand, but Sir Robert stepped between them, grim as fate and as vindictive. “No!” he said. “No! No more! You have given her pain enough, sir! Take your dismissal and go! She has chosen—you have said it yourself!”