"A lie, Matthew? Thank you again. It is but a few evenings ago since I saw--myself unseen--the head of Eleanor Lloyd laid on the shoulder of John Pomeroy: since I saw the lips of John Pomeroy pressed without reproof to those of Eleanor Lloyd. Such is my evidence. Set on it what value you please."
He seized a knife suddenly, as though he would have liked to stab her to the heart. But her eyes met his unflinchingly, as she stood opposite to him, and presently he sank back into his chair, and let his arm fall on to the table, and so sat with bowed head for a time, without speaking.
"This is your doing and my mother's!" he said at last, speaking slowly and bitterly. "It was through you that this vagabond had the opportunity given him of doing what he has done!"
"How was either I or your mother to know that what has happened would happen?" asked Olive. She felt that the time had not yet come when it would be safe for her to tell her cousin that Pomeroy had been brought to Stammars for the express purpose of falling in love with Miss Lloyd.
"To think of Eleanor Lloyd so far forgetting herself as to fall in love with an adventurer like Pomeroy! It seems impossible."
"You seem to forget that Pomeroy passes here as a gentleman. A poor one, it may be, but still a gentleman. And if you know anything at all of Miss Lloyd, you must know this, that the fact of Mr. Pomeroy being without a shilling in the world would not influence her estimate of him in the slightest possible degree."
"We will soon strip his fine feathers off him," exclaimed Kelvin, "and expose him for what he really is--an adventurer and a vagabond. I'll go to Sir Thomas this very day, and tell him everything."
Olive had quite expected that her cousin would be angry when he heard her news, and would threaten to expose everything to Sir Thomas; but she had kept an arrow in store for such an occasion, which she now proceeded to let fly.
"How inconsistent you are, cousin Matthew!" she exclaimed. "Why has certain news been kept back from Eleanor Lloyd for so long a time? That question you can answer as well as I can. Cannot you, therefore, comprehend how much more complete will be your revenge on this woman who rejected you with contempt and scorn, if, through your agency, she is hoodwinked into marrying a penniless adventurer like Pomeroy, rather than a gentleman and a man of honour like Captain Dayrell? Cannot you, I say, comprehend all this?"
"The question did not strike me in that light," said Kelvin, in the quick way habitual with him when any fresh idea was put before him. "If I have wished once, I have wished a thousand times," he said, "that I had never hidden from Eleanor that which it was my duty to have told her the moment the knowledge came into my possession. But such regrets are useless."