“Ah! Willoughby! I am so doubly cursed that I can laugh to scorn all other ills of life. My cup of misery is full; one drop more and it must overflow, and life will ebb with it.”
“But can I do nothing to help you—absolutely nothing?” I demanded, looking earnestly into her eyes.
She shook her beautiful head despondently, and her breast heaved and fell in a long deep-drawn sigh.
“You saw the Frenchwoman, and you failed,” was her despairing reply. “It was the last chance afforded to me, and it is lost—lost. I know, now Richard Keene has returned, that I must suffer.”
“But if Marigold can save you from this terrible fate that threatens you, why does she refuse?”
“She has, I suppose, some motive known to her in secret,” was my love’s reply. “You know her character just as well as I do. Before her marriage there was—well, an incident. And I presume it is this which she fears that George may know.”
“But if you are aware of it, will you still conceal it though this woman is your enemy? Recollect,” I said, “that she has no love for her husband. Hers was a mere marriage of convenience.”
“Ah, yes, I know,” she said. “But would you have me condemn a woman even though she be my enemy? No, Willoughby, that is not like you. I know that revenge is never within your heart, you are always too generous.”
I regretted that I had made such a suggestion, and bowed beneath her reproachful words. Yet it somehow seemed that if she possessed the knowledge of this “incident,” whatever it was, she might hold it over her enemy as a threat, and use it as a lever to obtain the information she desired from the Countess’s lips.
“Poor George!” I exclaimed. “What, I wonder, can be the end of his life with such a woman? And yet he is so utterly infatuated by her. I threatened to speak to him regarding certain of her actions but she has openly defied me, saying that he is too deeply in love with her to hear any word of condemnation. And she’s absolutely right, I believe,” I added, sighing.