“What do you want me to do?” he asked, leaning back upon the mantelshelf in affected laziness—“you want my silence?”
“Yes,” she answered eagerly, looking straight into his dark countenance.
“You’re afraid that if you marry Charlie Armytage I may expose you—eh?”
She nodded, with downcast eyes.
He was silent for a few moments.
“Then,” he answered at last in a deep, determined voice, “understand once and for all that Armytage is a friend of mine. He shall never marry you.”
She knit her brows, and her pale lips twitched nervously. “Then you are still bent upon wrecking my life?” she said slowly and distinctly as she faced him. “I offer you silence in exchange for my freedom, for it is you alone who can give me that. Yet you refuse.”
“Yes,” he said. “I refuse absolutely.”
“Then you would debar me from happiness with the man I love?” she said in a low, deep whisper. “You, the man to whose machinations I owe my present wretchedness, refuse to free me from the trammels you yourself have cast about me—you refuse to tell the truth in exchange for my silence.”
He looked at her calmly with withering contempt.