Pity me! You can assign no secondary reasons now to
professions like these. You are no longer rich--no longer--"
"Miss Kilmansegg, with the golden leg," I interrupted, derisively.
"Truly you surprise me."
"O Miriam! how can you treat me with such heartless levity?" and he
wrung his hands bitterly. "I am pushed to desperation already. I never
knew, until I lost you, what you were to me; how superior to all other
women, how pure, how unworldly, how strong, how rich in all mental and
womanly endowments! Hear me, Miriam," and he attempted to take my hand,
an error of which he was soon made conscious.
"Claude Bainrothe," I said, sternly, "I can tolerate you on one
condition alone--that you respect me. You cease to do this, you, the
betrothed husband of another woman! the moment you sully my ear with
your addresses, your effusions of sentiment. They are no more, I know;
but even these I will not endure from you, nor yet from--" I hesitated;
a hated name had risen to my lips, but I repressed it. He, the son,
surely was not the father's keeper.
"You do me injustice; before Heaven, you do!" he exclaimed, flinging
back his long curling locks impetuously, by a toss of his superb head,
and bending his blazing eyes upon me. "Hear me, Miriam, I hold the clew
to a secret by means of which I can compel wealth to flow back to your
feet, in the old channels, if you will be mine.
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