“Compelled!” I echoed, in a voice full of bitter sarcasm. “I do not—indeed I cannot blame you for regretting the false step you took when you consented to become my wife, yet why you should have done this is to me utterly incomprehensible.”
“It will all be plain ere long,” she assured me, in a low, intense voice. “If I had not loved you, I should never have become your wife.”
“But you were cruel to deceive me thus,” I retorted.
“It is my misfortune, Geoffrey, that I was born a Grand Duchess,” she answered, looking straight at me with her deep blue eyes full of intense anxiety and sorrow. “It is not my fault. I swear I still love you with a love as honest and pure as ever a woman entertained towards a man.”
“But after deceiving me in every particular regarding both the past and the present, you thought fit to leave me,” I went on ruthlessly.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, as if reflecting, “I admit that I wronged you cruelly; yes, I admit it all, everything. Nevertheless, since we have parted, Geoffrey, I have recollected daily, with a thousand heartfelt regrets, the supreme joy of our married life. Ah! it was happiness, indeed, with you, the man I so dearly loved. But now,” and she shrugged her shoulders, half-hidden in their pale blue chiffon, the movement causing her diamonds to gleam with fiery iridescence. “Now, without your love, I have happiness no longer. All is despair.”
“I have not forgotten. Every detail of our brief, joyous life together is still fresh in my memory,” I declared sorrowfully.
“Forgotten! How can either of us forget?” she cried impetuously, pushing back from her white brow her gold-brown hair, with its scintillating star. “Only in those few months spent by your side, Geoffrey, have I known what it is to really live and to love. Although I have been absent from you I have, nevertheless, known from time to time how you have fared, yet I dared not give you any sign as to my whereabouts, fearing that you would brand me as base and heartless. To you I must appear so, I know; yet, although we are separated, I am still your wife and you my husband. I still love you. Forgive me.”
And she stood before me with bent head in penitent attitude, her slight frame shaken by tremulous emotion.
A lump rose in my throat. I felt choked by the intoxication of her love, for I idolised her. Yet I knew that, although my wife, she could never be the same to me as in those blissful days in Kensington before the shadow of suspicion fell between us.