"Not that! I should be dead!" was the cry that rose within her heart at the thought.
And yet she was his wife! Those few words spoken before the English Consul by a reckless adventurer and an ignorant child had made her his for life, even though he ignored her existence, even though she had given her heart and her word to another.
A shudder ran through her at the thought, and involuntarily her dark eyes turned upon him again with a look in which hate and fear were mingled. Meeting his gaze, she quickly averted her own; but that second look had the effect of completely sobering Wallace.
The intensity of contempt and dislike it suggested was a revelation to him. Demoralised as he was, he would rather have faced any danger than this girl's quiet scorn, and the aversion she entertained against him, which her sensitive face unmistakably betrayed, attracted his attention to her as nothing else could have done.
As he watched her, a dull resentment against his cousin grew stronger within him at every moment. It was impossible that this girl could look at him and speak to him as she had done if her mind had not been poisoned against him. That her haughty coldness was assumed he knew from the manner in which she had at first greeted him. It must certainly be Lorin who had made her hate him in advance, and for this Lorin should be made to suffer.
"You expect my cousin this afternoon, I believe?" he said, addressing Clare, abruptly.
"Don't ask me," the young lady replied, archly; "you must ask my friend, Miss Grahame. Lina dear, do you expect Mr. Armstrong to-day?"
"I think not."
"Think? Surely you know, darling! When you were skating at his uncle's house at Hampstead yesterday, didn't he make any appointment to come to-day? But perhaps I oughtn't to ask."
"Were you at the Homestead yesterday?" Wallace asked, his face changing suddenly.
"Yes."
"It's a charming old house, is it not?" Clare asked him, innocently.
"Oh, you mustn't ask me!" he answered, with an assumption of carelessness. "I am not allowed inside it, and I haven't seen even the outside for ten years now. You must know, Miss Cavan, that during that time I have been a pariah, driven from my home, and sent as a scapegoat into the wilderness. You know the Prodigal Son story; well, I am the prodigal nephew, only there wasn't any outlay on veal on my account! And so far from my excellent industrious apprentice of a cousin having to turn out for me, it is only by his condescending charity that I am enabled to live at all! He has my uncle's confidence and affection, and no doubt he will have his money. He has his position in Wallace's Bank and will be made a partner there very shortly. He lives in clover in the best rooms in the house and the Homestead is practically his own property already. Everywhere in society he is courted and fêted—he is such a charming-mannered man, you see, and wears such nice clothes, and, best of all, he will be Alexander Wallace's heir. Consequently, beautiful girls, all saintly pride and touch-me-not coldness towards poor broken-down disinherited devils like me, carney to my cousin, and throw themselves into his arms, declaring that they can't live without him, and should have gone mad had he stayed away one moment longer. Oh, it's the way of the world, Miss Cavan! Your vestal virgin of the present day is ice to the man with no banking-account, but thaws marvellously in the presence of a fellow with ready cash and expectations. The men who go under need expect no sympathy nor any civility. The really good women are so busy making love to and marrying the eligibles that they have no time to waste on the others; and the modern prodigal son, if he ventured back to his father's villa, would be insulted on the doorstep by his younger brother's fiancée, who would look at him as if he were dirt, and speak to him as if he were a dog. That, at least, is my experience of women!"
He had risen while he spoke, and now towered massively in the centre of the room, his hands clenched, his face pale with anger, which he with difficulty repressed from breaking into a storm of fury. Although nominally addressing Clare, he stared across at Laline where she sat with lowered eyes by the fire, and clearly directed his diatribe against her.
Clare glanced from one to the other, barely able to conceal her delight at the turn things were taking. To hear Laline insulted was balm to Miss Cavan; and she with difficulty kept a note of triumph out of her voice as she begged Mr. Armstrong to resume his seat and not to distress himself.
"It must be very hard to feel yourself supplanted, as you say," she purred in her soft tones; "but really I can't allow you to speak so severely against women! I am sure that many—indeed, most of them—sympathise with the unfortunate, and that we are not all mercenary. I for one am extremely sorry for you, and so, I am sure, is Miss Grahame—aren't you, Lina dear!"
Laline did not speak; and after a few seconds of silence Wallace took up his tale again.
"You are most kind, Miss Cavan," he said; "but you are injudiciously so when you lavish sympathy upon an unsuccessful man. Your friend Miss Grahame is, if I may say so, far more business-like. She metes out devotion to the rich man and scorn to the poor one in admirably calculating fashion."
Challenged thus directly, Laline slowly rose from her seat, quivering in every limb, and almost as white as her dress.
"My affection and respect are not given to your cousin because he is rich, Mr. Armstrong," she said in a low voice that vibrated with intense feeling, "but because he is a frank and loyal and honourable gentleman, honest in his dealings with men, and gentle and chivalrous to all women. I have never heard of you until to-day, but now that I have seen you my warmest sympathy goes to your cousin. Please let me pass!"
Her soft dark eyes literally blazed with excitement as she waved him imperiously aside and passed from the room, leaving Clare and Wallace standing opposite each other, subdued with sudden quiet by Laline's words and by the note of passionate indignation and despair they could not understand which thrilled through her voice.
"I can't understand Lina," Clare protested, after a pause; "she is usually so gentle. I am afraid you and she have taken a dislike to each other."
"How long has she known my cousin?" her companion inquired.
"Oh, she has only met him two or three times! I myself had no idea that there was anything at all between them until yesterday, when she was out with him all the afternoon; but this morning she confessed to me that she was engaged to him. It seems so very strange, as dear Lina had never given me or my aunt the least hint of such a thing. But of course I am extremely glad for her sake, as she is an orphan, poor child, and hasn't a penny——"
"Why do you say you are glad," Wallace interrupted, bluntly, "when in reality you are bitterly angry? Do you suppose I haven't guessed who wrote me that letter I got last night telling me to call here to-day?"
"What can you mean?"
"Oh, humbug is no good with me, Miss Cavan!" he said, laughing scornfully. "You've got your knife into this Grahame girl, and into my cousin too, for some reason best known to you. Did you want to marry him yourself?"
"Really, Mr. Armstrong——"
"Oh, it's no use turning on injured innocence for me! I never yet met the woman whose word I believed. If you want to know how it was I guessed you wrote me that letter, I'll tell you in a very few words. In it you spoke about sympathising with me and being very sorry for me; and you used the same expressions this evening. Well, no one is really sorry for me—why should they be? My troubles are of my own making; and if I get disinherited, it is entirely my own fault. What are you opening those pretty wicked-looking eyes for? Are you so little accustomed to truth that it startles you to hear it? I say my troubles are my own fault, because my uncle cares more for my little finger than for my cousin's whole body. Being a narrow-minded and a tediously pious and virtuous old nuisance himself, he has a secret love for a thorough-paced scamp. I have only to pretend to reform for a few weeks to get what I liked out of him; but I can't be bothered with it. For years roughing it among bad company in the Colonies took away all the taste for civilised society I ever had, which was never much. I can't sit hour after hour tied to a desk quill-driving; I can't pretend to interest myself in tomes and ledgers and bills-of-exchange any more than I can talk twaddle in a drawing-room over sloppy tea, or play lawn-tennis with a lot of prim bread-and-butter misses without a word to say for themselves. If I think a woman pretty, I tell her so; if I feel inclined to make love, I do so. I am made to lead my own life, to eat and drink and walk and sleep and fight and make love, and perhaps get drunk and get sober again, but it must be in my own way. No one can drive me, and no one presumes to pity me. Consequently, it wasn't difficult for me to guess that this pretty but unnecessary sympathy of yours was only a trick of speech to serve your own ends. Do you understand, Miss Cavan?"
"I understand," she replied, a rare blush creeping over her white skin, "that you are frightfully impertinent!"
"I mean to be more impertinent yet," he said, and, suddenly stooping, kissed her.
"That is the way to treat pretty women who tell lies," he observed, coolly picking up his hat as he spoke. "And, now that I have sampled both the young ladies, I won't stop and see the old one. You and I are friends, Miss Cavan, and you may rely on me to do you a good turn if it suits my book also. As to this proposed marriage of my angelic cousin with that infernally proud stuck-up girl, I'm no more minded to it than you. I should dearly love to pay her out for her insolence, and I have little doubt that an opportunity will come in my way. You know who obligingly finds mischief for idle hands. Well, mine are always idle. There's some one coming in down-stairs—your aunt, I expect. Give me another kiss before she comes. Oh, don't pretend to be offended; it's silly waste of time! Girls with eyes like yours—les yeux en coulisse—always like kisses! And who knows? I am worth encouraging, for I may be my uncle's heir after all."
CHAPTER XXI.
There is a cynical French proverb which states that the worse the man, the better he understands women.
In the case of the two Armstrongs the saying was so far true that Wallace Armstrong the elder, after only half-an-hour's intercourse, gauged to a nicety the mental and moral attributes of Clare Cavan, of which his cousin had but an elementary notion. He admired her beauty, and looked with amusement on her untruthfulness, her slyness, and her envious disposition. Vanity and sensuality were two qualities he always expected to find in women, and he at once recognised them as leading characteristics of Clare's nature. She belonged to a type he thoroughly understood; and he knew perfectly well that in her secret heart she would not in the least resent the insolently-worded admiration or the careless caresses of a man as handsome as himself, even though she believed herself to be in love with his cousin. Like many another man who professes to understand women, however, Wallace Armstrong had gained his experience among the least worthy members of a sex which he in consequence thought himself justified in scorning. Love of money and love of themselves were, in his opinion, the two ruling motives in every woman's life; and by appealing strongly enough to either of these, any man could make a conquest of any woman—a conquest which, when made, would be, in Wallace's opinion, not worth having. These ideas, which he freely professed, only made him the more popular with such women as came in his way, and he was able from experience to calculate exactly the effect of his unconventional behaviour upon Clare Cavan.
That young lady was not accustomed to being found out. Her drawing-room triumphs had not prepared her for this rough-and-ready style of address; but she relished it none the less, belonging as she did to the type of woman who secretly worships a bully. Her intense vanity led her to believe that the elder Armstrong had fallen in love with her at first sight; and she would have been deeply mortified had she known that his sole reason for ingratiating himself with her, and presently with Mrs. Vandeleur, was that he might have opportunities of meeting the girl who had been introduced to him as Lina Grahame. Clare Cavan's kiss he instantly forgot; but Lina Grahame's look of scorn and hatred seemed to burn into his soul.
How dared she—a penniless companion, a prudish, calculating, fortune-hunter, intent on securing a wealthy husband—how dared she gaze at him as though he were a thing accursed? Not for a moment could he forget her dark eyes, distended with horror, as they fixed themselves upon him, or the disdainful curve of her sweet red month, or the tone in which she said she loved Lorin for being an honourable gentleman, but pitied him since she had met his cousin.
For years he had not wished for anything so ardently as he now longed to humble this girl's pride and give her back scorn for scorn. Her face lingered persistently in his mind; he had but to close his eyes to recall every feature with absolute distinctness, even the two perpendicular lines between her eyebrows when she frowned, and the quick trick of her fingers pushing her hair from her brow, seeming strangely familiar to him. It was presumably the sympathy of hate, he told himself, which made her image so clear and dominant in his mind. Yet he lingered at Mrs. Vandeleur's, in the hope that Lina Grahame might again appear, for fully an hour after the elder lady's return.
His handsome appearance and surly manners interested Mrs. Vandeleur, who promptly prophesied all manner of evil things for him from a cursory study of his hand and face.
"You have quite a remarkably wicked hand!" she exclaimed, bending over it with a touch of genuine excitement. "Decidedly you were born under an evil star, for you bring misfortunes to yourself and to other people alike; and what is more curious, you appear to deserve them. I am really afraid of telling you more, lest I should hurt your feelings."
"Not a bit. I am accustomed to strong language on the subject of my character, from my relations and from police-court officials alike."
"You have no moral principles whatever," continued the little lady, turning over his large, well-shaped, but, truth to tell, not over-clean hand with her delicate be-ringed fingers. "You are wholly unreliable and most ungrateful; your passions are violent, and you make no attempt to control them. You are selfish to the core——"
"Pray stop the catalogue of my deficiencies, Mrs. Vandeleur, or your niece here will fall madly in love with me!"
"Your past has been troubled and stormy, and your future looks very black," continued the little lady, quite unmoved by his sarcasm. "Only one thing can save you—the love of a good, pure woman."
She uttered the words with her usual slow impressiveness, letting his hand fall as she finished speaking; and, although he affected to treat the matter lightly, her words rang through Wallace's brain when he left her house a little later in the evening.
It was a miserably dull and gloomy evening, bitterly cold and shrouded in fog. There was some excuse for spirit-drinking under the circumstances; but Wallace did not require an excuse for the constant whiskies-and-sodas and "nips" of raw brandy in which he indulged at all hours of the day and night when free from his cousin's watchful care. Since his imprisonment he had been lodging in a street off the Strand; and, although he was forbidden to enter Alexander Wallace's house, his cousin encouraged his visits there in the hope of keeping him out of mischief. It was easy enough for him to summon Adams by knocking in a peculiar manner agreed upon between them, and then to slip up-stairs to Lorin's rooms, where he was sure of warmth and comfort and a hearty welcome. Old Alexander was aware that his orders regarding his elder nephew were set at naught, and he was well pleased that it should be so. Wallace had angered and shamed him so deeply that his name was a forbidden subject in the household, and the old gentleman affected to believe that he had only one nephew. That his sister's child, whom he had brought up from a boy and loved as his own son, should be convicted of drunkenness and brutal violence and sent to prison with hard labour, had been a terrible blow to the old man, from whom Lorin had often contrived to keep his cousin's delinquencies a secret. The disgrace of the whole affair went nigh to break Alexander's heart, and none the less so because he had always most unreasonably loved his elder nephew the better of the two.
Lorin was now seven-and-twenty; and since his parents' death, eighteen years before, he had been adopted by his uncle, to whom he had been in every way a credit. Beyond a few school scrapes, the result of boyish high spirits, and a little unnecessary expenditure at college, there had been no fault to find with him. He had been a good, even a brilliant scholar, and had won the liking and esteem of all who had to do with him as a growing lad; and when arrived at man's estate the same tale was true. Although disinclined for office work, he had set himself to master the entire business at the bank, with the result that his opinion was already of value in the house, while outside among general society he was extremely popular and everywhere in great request.
With his cousin it was far otherwise. As a mere baby he had been placed in Alexander Wallace's care by the latter's elder sister, a woman of passionate and ungovernable temper, very unhappily married to a man from whom she was speedily separated. The heart of the old bachelor-uncle went out to the handsome black-haired baby boy at first sight, and no subsequent delinquencies on Wallace's part could wholly alienate from him his uncle's love. By turns he was expelled from school, "plucked" for examinations, rusticated from college, and gradually shunned by the more respectable and law-abiding of his acquaintances. A fierce, sardonic temper and instinctive rebellion against all constituted authority characterised him from early boyhood, and his uncle's indulgence, while it bred in him no reciprocal affection, developed to the full the boy's intensely selfish nature and extravagant disposition. As a lad he possessed considerable charm of manner, despite his intractable disposition; and from the time when, at the respective ages of nine and twelve, the two cousins first met, Lorin had loved and shielded him, often taking upon himself the blame for Wallace's misdemeanours, and showing towards his elder an affectionate forbearance which the latter was wholly incapable of appreciating.
At twenty-one, Wallace Armstrong forged his uncle's name on several separate occasions, chiefly in order to settle his heavy gambling debts, some of which he had contracted at the club kept at one time by Captain Garth, Laline's father.
Then followed years of banishment, spent for the most part in gambling-dens, hotel-bars, and billiard-rooms, among the male and female "riff-raff" of the Colonies, leading up to the moment of Wallace's return to Europe, and his memorable meeting with Captain Garth in the market-place of Boulogne.
From the time of his return to his uncle's house, under his cousin Lorin's care, in deep mourning for the youthful bride of whom typhoid fever had, so he said, deprived him, Wallace Armstrong's conduct had grown daily worse. At the beginning he did indeed make some pretence of earning his living as a clerk in his uncle's employment; but his unpunctuality, his carelessness, and his habit of appropriating as his own any loose change that might pass through his hands, speedily proved his unsuitability for such a position. Both Lorin and his uncle set to work to find some outdoor occupation which such a ne'er-do-well might find within his powers; but Wallace's total unreliability, his insolence and laziness, together with his intemperate habits, rendered him undesirable in any wage-earning capacity whatever. He did not like work and had no intention of working, and he detested regular hours and the conventions of peaceable citizenship. But for Lorin's incessant care and kindness and the generosity with which he denied himself in order to provide his cousin with more than the mere necessities of life, Wallace would have gone under long before. Yet he was in no way grateful to Lorin, but cherished against him a bitter snarling envy which he did not scruple to express in words.
"I know you enjoy unselfishness and that sort of thing," he would say, while pocketing his cousin's money, "so I won't deprive you of the chance of feeling virtuous. This doling out pocket-money to me, and filling up my whiskies with your infernal soda-water, and bailing me out when I am run in, all places you in a beautiful light of self-sacrifice and stained-glass-window sort of nobility and charity. The prodigal son's brother made a great mistake in openly grudging the outlay on the other fellow; it would have paid him better in the long run to have pretended a great concern for his welfare, as you do for mine."
On this particular evening, when Wallace found himself in the Crescent outside Mrs. Vandeleur's house, he did not feel in the mood for his favourite amusement of sneering at his cousin. Certain things he had seen and heard during the course of his visit had made an unusually strong impression upon his ordinarily callous and drink-sodden brain.
"I love your cousin because he is a frank and loyal and honourable gentleman—honest in his dealings with men, and gentle and chivalrous to all women."
He could hear the words now ringing through his head in those sweet deep tones of a voice which was oddly familiar to him.
Had this Lina Graham known him intimately instead of being a complete stranger to him, she could scarcely have chosen words more calculated to wound him by emphasising the differences between him and his cousin.
Frank and loyal, honourable and honest, gentle and chivalrous!
Not one of those qualities was to be found in Wallace, and he knew it. Even his apparent brusque truthfulness was assumed, and he could, if the occasion served, lie with apparent directness and simplicity. Women in general, or, at least, such women as he met, liked a man the better for his bad reputation; but this little prude in white was clearly not of these. He hated to recall the scorn of her gaze; it pricked and stung him even while he endeavoured to drown all clear remembrance in copious draughts of fiery fluid. To-night, as he wandered from one to another of his usual haunts, the miserable futility of the life he led came before him for the first time. In the clear eyes of a girl he saw himself mirrored and shrank in horror and disgust at the reflection.
In his thirty-first year, what was he but a homeless waif, a gaol-bird and a drunkard, subsisting upon charity, and biting the hand that fed him? Wallace buried his head in his hands and groaned aloud at the thought. Among the common and degraded persons by whom he was surrounded not one dared to ask what ailed him, for his surly and insolent temper was well known. Looking up and around him, he felt that he hated his companions, and that the coarse joviality which he had hitherto commended as unconventional was mere forced drunken buffoonery. Lina Grahame would know her contempt to be justified could she see him among such surroundings. With a muttered oath, and leaving his glass unemptied, he strode out again into the night. The fog got into his throat and choked him, the streets were deserted, but for a passing policeman on his beat and a few pedestrians loudly complaining of the bitter frost and hurrying home.
Home! Wallace had no home. His landlady had already more than once given him notice to quit; there would certainly be neither fire nor welcome awaiting him there. As to his uncle's house, he could indeed slip in there on the sly; but he had given his word to his cousin not to present himself there when he had been drinking too freely, and of a certainty he had been drinking too freely to-night.
What right had Lorin to extract such a promise—Lorin, to whom drink offered no temptation? What right had such a man to make rules of conduct for others? Doubtless he was sitting comfortably by the fire in his well-furnished rooms, thinking of Lina Grahame, and writing letters to her, or reading hers to him, or perhaps sketching her portrait. Warmth and comfort, the glow of the fire, and sweet thoughts of his love for him; the cold and dirty streets, the fog and frost, the flaring lights of a gin palace, and the thought of a woman's scorn, for his cousin. Very soon Lorin would marry, and then his, Wallace's, surreptitious visits to his uncle's house would be forbidden altogether. He could hear the voice in which she would speak the order concerning them.
"Lorin dear, you must really keep your cousin away. His very appearance is a disgrace to you. He is not fit to enter a gentleman's house."
In some such words she would speak, in that voice which to Wallace was like an echo from the past. And to-morrow she would tell Lorin about his disreputable cousin's visit, while she twined her arms about his neck and clung to him as she had clung to Wallace that evening when she had mistaken his identity.
He could feel the clasp of her fingers upon his shoulders now, and the silky softness of her hair as he stroked it, and the quiver that ran through her frame as he clasped her supple waist. She loved Lorin—there was little doubt of that. Passionate love thrilled through her touch, thrilled in her voice when she murmured—
"You have come at last!"
No good woman had ever loved him—no good woman had ever clung to him and welcomed his coming with such whole-hearted delight. What had that little witch woman prophesied about him?
"Your past has been stormy. Your future looks black. Only one thing can save you—the love of a pure, good woman."
The fact that he was really married seldom if ever troubled him. If it came into his mind at all, the remembrance provoked only curses on the head of his missing wife. Had she only proved reasonable, he might now have been installed with her in that very house at Hampstead which would soon be prepared for the reception of Lorin and his bride. Wallace cursed them both as he thought of them and of the happiness that awaited them. Fate had been against him, luck had been against him. His evil instincts, his ungovernable temper, his hatred of authority and love of violent pleasures, had been born with him and had led him on to the ship-wreck of his life.
Only the love of a good woman could save him, Mrs. Vandeleur had said. But good women looked at him with the eyes of Lina Grahame.
"Curse her!" he muttered, as he tossed down the raw spirit in his glass. "I wish, with all my soul, that I could do her an injury!"
CHAPTER XXII.
When Laline left the study and fled up-stairs to her room, she had by no means terminated her adventures for the day.
At first she could do nothing but sit with her hands tightly clasped in her lap, half-numbed by the extent of her misfortune. Her folly in failing to distinguish between the two cousins appeared to her now equally inexcusable and incomprehensible. Gradually, as she collected in her mind the evidence upon which she had acted, a conviction strengthened within her mind that she had been only too desirous of deceiving herself.
"I loved him, and so I persisted in believing he was my husband!" was the despairing cry of her heart. She had fallen in love at first with the younger Wallace Armstrong, and had encouraged herself in loving him by assuring herself that she was his wife already. This was now the first week in February, the month in which they were to have been married. Laline sprang from her chair at the thought and pressed her hands to her burning cheeks.
"How can I tell him?" she cried aloud. "How can I say that I must break it off and that we must never meet again, when only yesterday I kissed him and let him kiss me, and promised to be his wife? It is all horrible—impossible! What excuse can I give that he will believe? I cannot go to him and say, 'I will not marry him because I am his cousin's wife!' No one must ever know that. I would a thousand times rather die at this moment than be claimed by that horrible man, the very sight of whom turns me sick with disgust and hate! How could I ever think that Lorin, my Lorin, could have acted like that at Boulogne, could have ever been a gambler and a forger, ungrateful, deceitful, selfish, dissipated, and worthless?"
A wave of joy passed over her heart, in spite of her grief and perplexity, at the thought that the man she loved was in very truth the honourable and chivalrous gentleman Mrs. Vandeleur had declared him to be. Like Tennyson's "Lily maid of Astolat," Laline felt it was—
"Her glory to have loved
One peerless, without stain."
She had been ready to take him as her husband in spite of all she remembered and all she heard against him, but now that she knew his record to be absolutely clear she loved him the more. Tears rushed from her eyes as she realised that the happy life they had planned together could never be theirs. She must banish him from her sight; or, if he would not obey her entreaties and commands, she must herself pass out of his life and begin a new career in some place out of his reach and ken.
Until she met him, the prospect of a busy existence uncheered by the love of a man had not appeared specially formidable to Laline. But now her future life seemed to stretch before her as an arid plain, cheerless, and dreary, the mere thought of which made her shudder.
"I cannot live without him!" she sobbed. "I cannot live without his love! Why did he come into my life at all, if it was only to offer me a taste of happiness which I must never hope for again? It is too hard, too cruel!"
Rebellious, passionate thoughts rose in her mind, thoughts at which her own soul took fright. Through the fog the church-bells pealed out, faint and muffled; but Laline grew calmer at the sound. Her early training had been deeply religious, and now, in this hour of loneliness and despair, she sought comfort and refuge from her distracting grief in the service of the church.
Hastily slipping on her hat and cloak and the furs which Lorin had bought for her on the preceding day, she hurried down the stairs and out of the house unnoticed by any of the other inmates. To her aching heart and tired brain the quiet of the sacred building, the dignified yet simple words of the service she knew so well, and the sermon, taken from a beautiful passage in St. John's Gospel, proved infinitely soothing, and the mere act of supplication brought with it a sense of strength and coming help.
She had prayed to be taught what was her duty, and rising from her knees at the close of the service, tired out with the emotions of the day and very pale, her eyes red with long weeping and her lips quivering in the endeavour to keep back her tears, she passed out of the church with the rest of the congregation.
A walk of a very few minutes led to the opening of St. Mary's Crescent, and Laline was hastening thither, a little dazed by the fog and darkness after the brightly-lighted church, when some one laid a hand upon her shoulder.
"At last, my darling!"
She had known by his touch, which thrilled her with delight, that it was Lorin even before she had seen or heard him; and in the first moment of joy at the unexpected meeting she turned on him a face radiant with love and welcome. The light from a gas-lamp at the side of the pavement fell full upon her, and Lorin started back.
"My darling, how pale you are! And you have been crying! What has troubled you?"
His words recalled the truth to her. She turned away and strove to answer coldly.
"My head aches this evening," she said. "I must get off to bed early. I—I dare say it is the fog."
"Let me come in with you and speak to Mrs. Vaudeleur about you. I have a great deal to say to her."
"No, no—not to-night, and not until you have spoken to me first! You must come to-morrow and have a long talk with me. It is too late now, and I feel ill and tired—very tired!"
He drew her hand tenderly through his arm.
"You are crying again, my dear one!" he said. "I have a right to know what is troubling you. Let me take you home and stay with you a little while. Mrs. Vandeleur will, I am sure, excuse the informality of the visit now that she knows that we are so soon to be married."
"She knows nothing of all that."
"What? You have not told her?"
"Not yet. Don't be vexed, Lorin. I have not even seen her since you left me at the door last night."
"Well, at least you have told Miss Cavan?"
"Yes," Laline admitted, reluctantly, "I did say something about you to Miss Cavan."
"Something about me? Well, I suppose I must be content with that! But, Lina dear, are you so very much ashamed of me that you don't like to mention to any one that we are engaged?"
"No, of course not! How can you ask such an absurd question! But"—and here Laline was seized by a brilliant idea—"you know Mrs. Vandeleur will be very much annoyed at the idea of losing me just when I am beginning to be so useful to her as a secretary. We are exceedingly busy over her two books, and she has often told me that my value to her lies in the fact that my mind is not distracted by thoughts of love or money. She has been exceedingly kind to me, and it really seems too bad to talk about leaving her to get married almost as soon as we have started comfortably working together. It isn't fair to her, you see."
She spoke very fast, and lowered her head that he might not see the anxiety and distress in her eyes.
He laughed and drew her arm closer against his.
"Not fair to her!" he said. "How about being fair to me? Which is the more important—that Mrs. Vandeleur should lose an amanuensis to assist her in the compilation of her interesting but mischievous mysticism, or that you and I should miss the happiness of both our lives? Under the circumstances I should say it was rather wise of her to foretell terrible troubles to you should you fall in love. You are in love, I hope, dearest! And where are all these prophesied griefs and woes? No future can look brighter than ours."
She shuddered and clung closer to his arm. If he only knew!
"My uncle," Lorin continued, "is in the highest state of delight about our coming marriage. He wants you to have luncheon with him to-morrow. Bring Mrs. Vandeleur, if she will come at such short notice; but don't disappoint him. He was most anxious that I should bring you round to-day to receive his congratulations. I told him you had forbidden me to call until Monday. What I did not tell him was that I have been hanging round St. Mary's Crescent at intervals the whole day, hoping to catch you as you went in or out. I had a presentiment that you would be in trouble or low spirits, the result, I suppose, of a bad dream I had about you last night."
"What was that?"
"Oh, just as utterly meaningless and inconsequent as are most dreams! I thought I was in a forest, looking for you and following you. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of your white dress—you wore that gown you had on when I first saw you—glimmering through an opening in the trees. But as soon as I dashed forward in pursuit the branches closed together, as in the 'Sleeping Beauty' story, and you were lost to me again, while the whole wood seemed filled with mocking laughter."
"What sort of laughter?" she inquired, eagerly. "Was it like the laughter of any one you know?"
"Why do you ask? Perhaps it was—a little. But, Lina dear, you are trembling. It is horribly selfish of me to keep you walking about in the fog when you told me you were so tired! Let me take you home!"
"No—not yet, Lorin! I have a great deal to say to you, and I must say it now while no one can hear me. I—I have been thinking deeply all to-day, and I have decided that you and I have been too hasty—we have not given ourselves time to know our own minds."
"Wait!" he exclaimed. "I felt sure something was weighing on your mind; but I can't listen here in the noise of the streets. We will pass into the Park while you tell me."
They had reached the Albert Hall, and he led her at this point into Hyde Park, deserted but for a few devoted sweethearts, as regardless as themselves of the cold and fog and frost.
"Now tell me again, dear," he said, gently, "what you have to say about our engagement!"
In the obscurity he slipped his arm about her waist, and at his touch a restful delight crept over her senses. For a few seconds she kept silence. Very soon they must part, and with a whole lifetime of dreary lovelessness before her, surely she might without great sin afford herself the momentary joy of revelling in his caresses.
But duty, stern and forbidding, lay before her, and suddenly nerving herself to the effort, she drew away from him.
"I have something to say to you," she began, "and I want you to walk quietly by my side listening, and not to touch me while I speak. Lorin, we have made a great mistake; I, at least, know that I was only flirting with you. I had made up my mind before I met you not to marry, and I am still of the same mind. Let us just be friends again!"
"Never! We never have been friends, my darling, and we never can be! I loved you from the first moment when I heard your voice, from the first moment when I saw your face in the full lamplight. I was never your friend only, and I never shall be. I was and am your lover, and I shall be your husband!"
"I was only flirting!" she cried in desperation. "I thought you were in love with Clare Cavan! You flirted with her, I flirted with you. I—I have no real feeling for you at all! It was just a little petty triumph to get you away from her!"
The words died on her lips. He had stopped in the middle of the gravel-path and had drawn up her hands upon his shoulders.
"I told you not to touch me!" she faltered.
"Lina," he whispered, "Lina dear, even in fun I can't let you speak of yourself like that!"
He drew her tenderly into his arms. Her heart was beating madly and convulsive sobs began to shake her frame.
"Why do you torment me?" she cried, breaking into a storm of tears. "Can't you see that I am in earnest—that I am trying to find any excuse to free myself from my promise to you? I cannot marry you—I will not marry you! It is of no use to ask me for reasons! On my word of honour I am in earnest—I was never more in earnest in my life! It has all been a mistake from the beginning. I can never be your wife!"
"Lina!"
"It is of no use," she cried, hysterically, "to remonstrate with me or to appeal to my feelings. I have no feelings where men are concerned. I was always a flirt—Mrs. Melville could have told you that. At Norwood the foreign masters used to propose to me; but I never cared. It is all vanity with me and I don't know what love means!"
"Lina!"
"Oh, don't stand repeating my name like that! It would be more dignified if you get angry. But nothing can make any difference. You might spend the rest of your life and mine on your knees to me, but I cannot marry you—cannot! Do you understand, Mr. Armstrong? It is all over, this love-story of ours, and all we have to do now is to forget it!"
Through all the hysterical excitement of her talk there rang a note of despair which Lorin failed not to recognise and for which he was greatly at a loss to account.
"Lina," he said, again, "you are ill and unstrung; you don't know what you are saying. Something very serious has happened to trouble you to-day. Presently, when you feel better and calmer, you must tell me all about it. But, my darling, it is useless to try and persuade me that you did not love me yesterday or that you do not love me now!"
"I do not!"
"Lina, it is horribly dark and foggy and you don't see very well with those lovely, tearful eyes of yours. But look up now into my face, with your hands in mine—so—and your heart beating near mine, and tell me again that you do not love me!"
She stood still as he directed, and, clasping her hands, he held them up against his breast. Her face was ashen pale and even her lips were white. She strove to keep up the pitch of unnatural nervous excitement to which she had worked herself; but gradually, as he clasped her hands close in his, he felt their tension relax. Her form lost its defiant erectness; she quivered and swayed towards him, and would have fallen had he not caught her in his arms.
"Oh, Lorin, Lorin, I am so unhappy! I think my heart will break!"
Very weak and pitiful her accents sounded now as, like a tired child, she rested her cheek upon his shoulder for a few seconds, weeping bitterly. Lorin asked her no questions and contented himself with gently soothing her. Presently her sobs ceased, and suddenly raising her head, she tried to laugh.
"It's like a servant on her 'Sunday out,' isn't it," she said, with a feeble attempt at cheerfulness, "to meet my 'young man' after church, and walk in Hyde Park, with his arm round my waist, crying? Servants, when they get engaged, always cry a great deal. I remember when our parlour-maid at Norwood got engaged to the baker, she used to shed floods of tears in the pantry, and even weep while waiting at table. She and her young man were perpetually having what she called 'words'—about three times a week it used to happen—and then Emma cried her eyes out until they made it up. And after all she married the postman."
"Well, and, now that we have had our 'words,' darling, and you have had your weeping, and we have made it up, since we are having our 'Sunday evening out' in the Park, and it's so dark one can't see across the road, you must kiss me in sign of reconciliation."
But she shrank away from him, remembering, with a pang, that she was another man's wife, and that her love for Lorin was no longer a pride to her but a grievous fault.
"Not now," she said; and then, before he had time to complain of her coldness, she suddenly asked him why he had never, in speaking to her, alluded to his namesake and cousin.
Lorin did not answer for a moment, and when he spoke, it was in a somewhat constrained tone.
"I may not have mentioned him by name," he said, "but we have certainly alluded to him in our conversations. I have spoken to you of the responsibility I undertook more than five years ago, when I brought my cousin over from Boulogne to England after his wife's death——"
"You brought him over?"
"Yes. Uncle Alec thought he had reason to distrust him; but I believed my cousin's letters and went to him. It was a very sad and painful experience in many ways. He had only been married a month when the poor girl died. I was shown her grave and a picture of her, painted when she was a child. She must have been very pretty; but from what my cousin subsequently told me, I should say that she and old Garth, who called himself her uncle, but who impressed me very unfavourably, and who, I strongly suspect, was really her father, were nothing better than a couple of needy and swindling adventurers. Wallace always speaks of them both with intense bitterness; but Uncle Alec has never heard him, and persists in believing that this Laline is an angel of goodness, and that, had she lived, Wallace would have been very different. And I think he is probably right. A good wife is a man's salvation if she will only cling to him through good report and ill, and may well redeem him by her unselfish love."
"You overrate me, I know," Laline said, in a stifled voice, "and think me much better than I am. Tell me truly, Lorin, knowing me and knowing him, do you think that if your cousin Wallace had been married to me, for instance, he would have been induced to lead a better life?"
He pressed both her hands tightly in his.
"It seems sacrilege," he exclaimed, "to think of you as married to him! But I believe that, if you had met him at the time I speak of, you might have saved him."
CHAPTER XXIII.
Lorin little guessed how his words, "You might have saved him," concerning his cousin Wallace stung Laline.
It was a view of the matter which had never presented itself to her that she had failed in her duty when she fled from her husband and her father at Boulogne. The formal and business-like contract before the Consul had meant so little to her, and the shock of discovering Wallace's real feelings and character was so great, that flight seemed the only course open to her at the time. But now, from the mouth of the man she loved, she heard the first judgment and condemnation of her conduct which had ever reached her, and as she walked on in silence by his side in her heart she rebelled against the sentence.
She was so young. What possible influence could a girl of sixteen have had over a man of determined temper and confirmed bad habits such as Wallace Armstrong? He did not even love her. Had she not heard him avow to her father that he considered her in the light of an encumbrance? More than that—his words had clearly foreshadowed the rough and even brutal treatment she would receive should she refuse to tell a series of lies to gain his ends. And by her help he had attained them. He had been taken to England, had been received into his uncle's house and given that start in life of which he professed to stand in need. Had she sacrificed her life to him as well, what more could he have secured? He had had his chance and had miserably failed to make use of it. With a wife or without a wife, in all probability he would still have been the same worthless, reckless, ne'er-do-well he had that evening shown himself to be.
Another point presented itself clearly to Laline in the pause that followed Lorin's speech. It was evident that he had formed an unfavourable opinion of his cousin's lost bride. On the strength of the falsified certificate and Wallace's misrepresentations he believed that she had been married for rather more than a month before she died. Should Laline therefore have been minded to tell him the whole truth, she would not only have had the greatest difficulty in making it credible and comprehensible to him, but she would have had to persuade him, in the face of her husband's and her late father's testimony and that of the certificate, that she had never been more than a nominal wife to his cousin.
A hot blush enveloped her from head to feet at the thought. Lorin was inclined to be jealous. How would he ever believe her again when he recalled her oft-repeated assertions that never before had she known the happiness of loving and being loved, and that his kisses were the first she had ever received, in the face of the fact of that early marriage?
To confide in him was clearly impossible. From what he had already stated as his opinions he might even think it right for her to go back to her husband, a course of which the mere idea sickened and terrified her. And yet, while he ignored the fact of her marriage, how could she possibly sever the link between them?
"Lorin," she asked him, suddenly, "what would you do, loving me as you say you do—and I believe you—if some terrible obstacle were to come between us?"
"I should fight against it until it was destroyed, of course."
"No—don't answer lightly. I am in earnest—in terrible earnest! Suppose it was with you as with some people in a book I read not long ago—that you had, while very young, contracted a marriage, a wholly unsuitable marriage, with a woman, whom you had left immediately because you found you had been terribly mistaken in her; suppose that you saw and heard nothing of her for years, and that then, having good reason for believing your wife dead, you had met me—just as you did, you know—and had grown to love me, as a man can love, with all your heart and mind and soul?"
"Well?"
"Then—say, at just this point where we are now—either to-night or to-morrow—say that you learned that the woman you married was not dead, but that, so far from wanting you, she ignored your existence, that she was practically insane, and that you could neither get free from her nor render her the least assistance, what would you do? Now think well, dearest, before you answer, for a great deal depends upon it."
"What can you mean?"
"Nothing; but that, much as I love you, I can't love you wholly unless I understand you wholly. Remember how short a time we have really known each other. I know you always tell me the truth; and so, by putting these imaginary cases and learning how you would act in them, I can grow to understand you better. Tell me what you would do?"
"It's so difficult to say," he answered, after a short pause, knitting his brows. "And you have made it more difficult by something you have just said—'I know you always tell me the truth.' A man might be terribly tempted in such a case as you described to say nothing, and to seize his happiness while it lay within reach. Life is so short and happiness so hard to get. But, if a woman trusted a man as you say you trust me, that would be a cowardly and treacherous act towards her."
"How, cowardly and treacherous if it made her happy—if it would have broken her heart to part from him?"
"My darling, you are exciting yourself very unnecessarily over these imaginary difficulties! There are actually tears in your eyes! Surely life has enough worries without inventing others? Let us dismiss the subject and be happy together while we may."
"I can't be happy unless you satisfy me. I am fanciful to-night, I know, but my head aches; and—and please humour me, Lorin dear, and answer me about yourself and what you would do. Don't say 'a man might,' but 'I should do' so and so. Think again! If you told me the truth in such a case, I suppose the only word you could expect would be 'Good-bye'?"
"I wonder," he said, thoughtfully—"I wonder if you would say that?"
"No—I shouldn't—I couldn't!" she cried, suddenly clinging to his arm. "And if I refused to part from you, knowing all, what would you do?"
"I suppose a man ought to protect a woman even against herself," he replied. "But I don't like to think of what I might do if losing you were at stake. You see, Lina, I have been waiting for you all my life; and I am twenty-eight this year—approaching middle life, in fact. Women have often charmed and interested me. I have wanted to talk to them, to sketch them, to look at them, but never to marry them. But as soon as I saw your face, and even before I saw it, when I had only stood near you and heard you speak, a voice within me said, 'That is my wife.' If you had been in quite another rank of life it would have been the same. Had you been a princess of the blood-royal or a laundress, I should have had to what is called 'make a fool of myself' for you. I was bound to follow you, to tell you of my love, to try and make you love me, but in any case to marry you. There was nothing else to be done, even if it involved Israel's seven years' courtship, though I should certainly have rebelled against such a long engagement! All my nature cried out for you. It is not only your beauty—though I love that most heartily—but it is the beautiful soul looking from your eyes that I love. Your voice, your touch, your presence, your mind and thoughts, are all just what I have dreamed of as my ideal, just what I require to make my life complete. Selfish that sounds, doesn't it? But I could not quite feel all that unless you had almost equal need of me. That is why I say that nothing must part us; and it would be not only folly but absolute wickedness either for you or for me to try to break the bond between us."
"Even if either of us was—married?" she faltered almost inaudibly.
"To some one else? But that would be impossible. I could not have felt as I did about you if I had not been, as you have often told me, the first and only man who ever spoke to you of love; nor could your eyes have met mine as they did and shown me your sweet child-mind shining through had you ever before cared for any man. There—are all your questions answered, and all your doubts set at rest?"
"Yes—I suppose so," she conceded. "I am tired, Lorin. Take me home now."
They passed out of the Park into the high road, and she walked by his side in silence while he spoke to her, tentatively at first, but with more assurance as she did not attempt to interrupt him, concerning their future plans, gently urging her to fix the exact date of their wedding.
"It seems odd that Mrs. Vandeleur should know nothing as yet direct from you about our engagement," he said; "but of course as you have not seen her that could not be helped. She will be in when you return, no doubt; and then you can tell her and arrange about the purchase of this wonderful trousseau which seems to trouble you so much. Surely a fortnight will be amply sufficient to buy all the finery you want? My uncle sends you, with his love, a blank cheque, to be filled in with what amount you please. Shall I give it to you now, or will you take it to-morrow when you are coming to luncheon with us?"
"Oh, to-morrow—to-morrow!" she answered, hurriedly, snatching at the chance of deferring that explanation which sooner or later was bound to come.
If she could only put off the marriage indefinitely the while she could enjoy the solace of Lorin's society, she told herself she would be well content.
"We are so happy as we are," she observed, presently, "that it seems to me to be very silly to hurry to another state of things. Old married people always look back to their courting days as to the happiest period of their lives. Personally I don't in the least want to be married for years to come. We can be dear friends and companions, and can meet when we please——"
"That is not nearly enough for me," he interrupted. "It is like offering a starving man a caramel to expect me to be satisfied with seeing you occasionally. I must not only see you all the time, but you must belong to me and I to you. My friend Robert Browning, whom you must grow to read and love, has glorified married love, which is the only happy love, in some of the finest lines ever written. Listen!
"'Life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and blended;
And then, come next life quickly! This world's use will have been ended.'"
A sob rose in Laline's throat as Lorin, holding her hand close within his arm, bent his head to murmur the words in her ear. The picture they presented before her mind's eye was tantalisingly happy, and yet it was just such perfect happiness that she must nerve herself to banish from her life. Tears blinded her as, with lowered head, she walked on by his side.
They had by this time reached the High Street, deserted at this late hour on Sunday night but for a small group of dirty loiterers outside a public-house, from the doors of which a man was apparently being forcibly thrown.
Laline, who had a feminine terror of drunken men, clung closer to Lorin's arm; but as he moved quickly to the outer edge of the pavement in order to give the group a wide berth, she felt him suddenly start violently, and looking up, perceived that he was frowning heavily and that he wore a look of deep annoyance.
Following the direction of his eyes, Laline instantly understood the cause of his vexation; for the man who, lividly pale and madly intoxicated, was struggling in the grasp of three others, shouting curses and dealing murderous blows to right and left of him, was Wallace Armstrong, Lorin's cousin and her husband.
Tightening the pressure of her hand within his arm, Lorin was hurrying Laline past the shameful spectacle, when she suddenly stopped him.
"Leave me," she whispered, with pale lips—"go to him! Take him away before he does more mischief!"
Lorin stared at her in astonishment.
"What—do you know——" he began, when she cut him short.
"I know everything. Leave me and take him home!"
Then, before he could speak, she drew her hand from his arm and flew rather than walked the short distance to St. Mary's Crescent.
Once she had re-entered the house and gained the privacy of her own room, she threw herself face downwards on the bed, feeling utterly worn out and exhausted by the experiences of the past twenty-four hours. Before her closed eyes two faces arose in the darkness—those of the man she loved and the man who was her husband.
As she had last seen them, so they flitted before her, Lorin's face clouded by a look of distress and indignation, which changed to deep tenderness as his eyes met hers, and Wallace's distorted by drink and by fury, as she had seen it years ago upon her wedding-day and again beheld it on this eventful evening.
And as she marked the contrast between them and compared her instinctive dislike and disgust in the presence of her husband with the passionate delight which thrilled her at the proximity of her lover, a temptation stole into her mind and grew stronger every moment.
Why, she asked herself, should not the dead past bury its dead? Laline Armstrong had disappeared—Wallace himself had given out that she was dead and his cousin and uncle believed him. She would even have some difficulty in proving her identity; and without the testimony of Mrs. Melville, between whom and herself many miles of ocean rolled, she would find it almost impossible to connect Lina Grahame with Laline Garth. The latter was dead and her actions had died with her. Why should she, Lina Grahame, hesitate to marry the man she loved because that dead Laline had once gone through a form of marriage with his cousin?
It was quite clear that Wallace did not recognise his over-grown child-bride in the tall and slender woman who was engaged to his cousin; and even Lorin, who had at first been haunted by her likeness to a portrait he had seen of Laline as a child, failed to recall where the picture had met his eyes. Only her own word could betray her, and that word she was strenuously resolved not to utter.
Surely—surely, she argued, as she lay there like some dead thing, scarcely breathing, so intent she was in thought, she would be committing no great sin if she ignored the past? It was not as if Wallace wanted her, remembered her, or had even ever loved her. Wallace was hopeless; and she almost wondered now at her own conduct when she despatched Lorin to his cousin's aid that night. Was she to spoil Lorin's life, and her own as well, for the sake of a degraded and drunken creature, alike incapable of gratitude and of love?
And yet the next moment, through all her horror of the man, there shone a gleam of compassion. Was it wholly his own fault that he was a pariah, driven to herd with social outcasts, to sit and drink his brains away amid tavern surroundings? To her personally, in those far-away Boulogne days, he had seemed extremely kind. She well remembered the treats he had given her and the children, the drives and sweets and pastry, and the pretty things he had bought for her. Her childish mind had been fascinated and interested by the man whose sable locks and stalwart frame reminded her of Brian de Bois-Guilbert.
Since those days he had indeed degenerated rapidly; but some good there must certainly be in him, or he could not have retained through all these years the affection of his uncle and his cousin. Her own father, too, had helped to ruin him as a very young man; and it was to settle debts incurred in Captain Garth's gaming establishment that Wallace had committed the forgery which first brought about his banishment from his native land.
These thoughts tortured Laline; and through the long hours of the night she lay awake, torn by conflicting sentiments of pity for Lorin, pity for herself, and pity for her husband. Towards morning she had half decided on flight as the sole way out of her difficulties, until the thought of a confession to old Alexander Wallace of all but the name of her husband suggested itself as an alternative course.
Throughout the wakeful hours she strove to fight down the insidious temptation to hold her peace and fulfil her engagement with the man she loved. No happiness could come, she repeatedly reminded herself, of a union founded on a lie. And how could she ever meet Lorin's eyes and hear him asseverate his trust and his belief in her with such a secret between them?
So all through the night the turmoil of her mind endured; and, when she rose in the morning, it was with the feeling that many years of thought and suffering had passed over her head.
Not one word of Lorin did she speak to Mrs. Vandeleur when she asked permission to go out to luncheon; and, once arrived at the bank, she half dreaded meeting him. Adams, the sedate-looking man-servant, showed her into the cosy sitting-room up-stairs, in which tea had been served on the occasion of her former visit.
A man, who was seated by the fire, with his back to the door, reading a newspaper, rose on her entrance and faced her. And Laline saw, to her intense vexation and alarm, that it was not Lorin, but his cousin Wallace Armstrong.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The colour fled from Laline's face as she found herself in the full daylight face to face with the man whom of all the world she least wished to meet.
Wallace on his part was deeply moved by her beauty, by the grace and refinement that distinguished her, and stirred to wonder where he had met the direct gaze of those wistful hazel eyes before. A sleepless night, together with the emotions she had recently experienced, rendered Laline unusually pale; but her pallor and extreme slightness only served to emphasise the spirituality and fragility of her appearance; and, standing there before him in her broad-brimmed black-velvet hat and rich furs, she looked like one of Gainsborough's dainty great ladies come to life in modern costume.
But the daylight, which revealed no flaw in the girl's clear skin and delicate features, touched the man less becomingly. Hard living had furrowed his face and prematurely silvered his hair and the light in his eyes was fitful and sunken. He looked what he was—the wreck of a man gifted by nature with exceptional strength and beauty, one who should have been a king among men, but who had let himself drift downward to the dregs of society.
He would have held out his hand, but her cold glance and still colder bow restrained him. An angry flush passed over his face as he noted them.
"Oh, I remember!" he said, trying to speak with defiant carelessness. "We insulted each other at our last merry meeting, didn't we, Miss Graham? But won't you let by-gones be by-gones?"
"I expected to meet Mr. Wallace and his nephew," she said icily, turning away that he might no longer study her face. She was trembling with excitement and nervousness and almost sick with fear lest he should recognise her. But her secret alarm was only indicated by an unsympathetic staccato of utterance.
"My cousin was telegraphed for to the City this morning, and cannot be here for at least half an hour. As to my uncle, he is at present in his rooms, and I have given particular instructions that he is not to know that you are here."
She turned upon him, white with indignant surprise.
"Do I understand you to say that you have given such an order?" she inquired.
"Yes."
"May I ask, Mr. Armstrong, your reason for taking so extraordinary a step?"
"I wanted to talk to you."
Laline's heart sank within her. Surely he could not have recognised her?
"I have not the slightest wish for any conversation with you, Mr. Armstrong!" she said, in a voice which it needed all her self-control to render firm. "May I ask you to ring the bell, that the servant may inform Mr. Alexander Wallace that I am here?"
"Wait a minute! I want to go back to something you said the last time I saw you!"
"There is no need, and I must decline to discuss the subject. If you do not ring the bell, Mr. Armstrong, I shall!"
She moved quickly towards the fireplace. She was horribly afraid of being left alone with him. Something in his coarse and masterful personality affected her with a sense of mingled fear and repulsion, and it seemed difficult for her to breathe the same air with him.
"I want," he repeated, doggedly, coming between her and the fireplace, "to speak to you about what you said when I last saw you."
"Pardon me," she exclaimed, flashing a look of deep scorn upon him, "that was not the last time I saw you! Much later, between ten and eleven at night, I was passing along the High Street, Kensington, and I saw you again!"
She lowered her voice on the last words, and a deep blush of shame for him passed over her face. Wallace saw the colour, and recognised the sentiment that called it there. Something like a flush crossed his face too.
"So you were with Lorin," he said. "I thought as much! All the more reason why I should speak to you. Miss Grahame, it was you who drove me to drink last night—you and no one else!"
For almost the first time in her life Laline smiled satirically. Clearly she did not believe him.
"It is true, all the same," he said, answering her look. "When Lorin got me out of that hole last night—and I admit he's had to do the same thing before—he took me home to my diggings; and presently, when I had had a cooling draught and put my head under the tap, it came out in a little talk that I had called on that table-rapping little woman yesterday afternoon in order to have a look at you. Then, for once in his life, my immaculate cousin lost his temper. I have hardly ever seen him so angry. It appears that he had been trying hard to keep me dark. Such men as I, he had the impudence to tell me, were not fit to cross the paths of such women as you, and it was sacrilege for me even to mention your name. 'Now I know why she wanted to break off her engagement with me!' he cried out. 'She could not bear the thought of being even distantly connected with you!' It was the first time that Lorin had ever rounded on me like that, and I could have killed him but for the fact that he had just bruised his arm a bit getting me out of a scrape."