‘Explain. Say what you have to say; I can endure it.’
‘Tom!’ Mr Dupuy murmured imploringly, turning to his nephew. After all, the elder man was something of a gentleman; he shrank from speaking out that horrid secret.
‘Well, you see, Mr Hawthorn,’ Tom Dupuy went on, taking up the parable with a sardonic smile—for he had no such scruples—‘my uncle naturally felt that with a man of your colour’—— He paused significantly.
Edward Hawthorn’s colour at that particular moment was vivid crimson. The next instant it was marble white. ‘A man of my colour!’ he exclaimed, drawing back in astonishment, not unmingled with horror, and flinging up his arms wildly—‘a man of my colour! For heaven’s sake, sir, what, in the name of goodness, do you mean by a man of my colour?’
‘Why, of course,’ Tom Dupuy replied maliciously and coolly, ‘seeing that you’re a brown man yourself, and that your father and mother were brown people before you, naturally, my uncle’——
Marian burst forth into a little cry of intense excitement. It wasn’t horror; it wasn’t anger; it wasn’t disappointment: it was simply relief from the long agony of that endless, horrible suspense.
‘We can bear it all, Edward,’ she cried aloud cheerfully, almost joyously—‘we can bear it all! My darling, my darling, it is nothing, nothing, nothing!’
And regardless of the two men, who stood there still, cynical and silent, watching the effect of their unexpected thunderbolt, the poor young wife flung her arms wildly around her newly wedded husband, and smothered him in a perfect torrent of passionate kisses.
But as for Edward, he stood there still, as white, as cold, and as motionless as a statue.
(To be continued.)