“I promise that you shall not make me angry this time—no matter what you say about him,” broke in Philip, gently.
She raised her head quickly, and looked at him for a moment or two in silence. “Dandy,” she said at last, looking at him strangely—“you have never been so good to me as you are to-night; never seemed so near to me. That old impatience of yours seems to be gone. Something has softened you; what is it?”
“Perhaps it is my love for you, dear Madge,” he said; and indeed, he thought then that the love of her might have softened any man.
“Do you think so?” she asked, smiling at him happily. “And you will promise not to be angry at anything I say?”
“Most faithfully.”
“Well, then, I mistrust that man. I think a woman sees deeper into the hearts of her fellow-creatures than a man can hope to do; perhaps it is God’s gift to her, for her greater protection. The world is a sweet and precious place to me—especially since we have been drawn so much more strongly together—you and I; but I say from my heart that it would be a better place if that man were dead.”
He looked at her in some astonishment; a rising tide of passion had flushed her face, and drawn her figure more erect.
“God forgive me for wishing harm to any living creature!” she went on, in the same low passionate voice—“but he is your worst foe, Dandy. Beneath his smiling, soft ways, he hides the heart of a devil; and I have seen that in his eyes, when you have not observed him, which has told me that he would not hesitate to do you a mischief, if you stood in the way of anything he desired.”
Philip Chater suddenly remembered, even in the interest he took in what she said, that he had a part to play. Therefore, with a shrug of the shoulders, he replied, lightly—“Indeed—you do him a wrong, Madge. Besides, I can take care of myself, even if he should be as bad as you paint him.”
Yet, how he longed, at that time, to tell her how true he believed her words to be! How he longed to fall at her feet, and tell her that the man to whom her heart had been given had been unworthy of it; that he was dead, and that another stood in his place—ready to take his place in a yet greater sense! But he knew that that was impossible; only, in his heart, was growing up a dreadful insane jealousy of the man who was dead.