never meant to marry
you--he never cared for you enough. He hated Richard Gilbert--that was
the beginning and end of it. He hated Gilbert, Gilbert loved you, and
was about to make you his wife; to revenge himself on Gilbert, he went
back to Kent Hill and carried you off. He knew you loved him, and it
would not be a difficult task. It seems easy enough for all women to
love Laurence Thorndyke."

The last words, spoken more to himself than to her, were full of
bitterness. A great stillness had fallen upon her--her eyes were fixed
on his face, her own strained and fixed.

"Go on," she said, her teeth set hard.

"He took you away--how, you know best, and in Boston that mockery of
marriage was gone through. Miss Bourdon the man Maggs was an actor, not
a clergyman, a besotted drunkard, whom fifty dollars at any time would
buy, rotten body and a filthy soul. 'She is as green as the fields she
came from'; that is what Thorndyke said to Maggs, 'as innocent as her
native daisies. She'll never know the difference, but she's one of the
sort that will love a fellow to desperation, and all that sort of thing,
and cry like a water-spout at parting, but who won't listen to a word
without her wedding ring. Let her have her wedding ring--always take a
short cut on a journey if you can.' So you got your wedding ring, and
without license or witnesses, and by a half-drunken actor a sham
ceremony was gone through. You were married to the scoundrel, for the
sake of whose handsome face you gave up home and friends, and the love
and honor of such a man as Richard Gilbert--one of the best and noblest
men America holds to-day!"

The hand, pressed over her heart, clutched it tighter, as if in a spasm
of uncontrollable pain.

"Go on," she said again.

"There's not much to tell. He brought you here, and in a week was bored
to death and sick of it all. He was only too glad of the chance to go,
and--he will never come back. Here is his note--read it--here is the
money he gave me, to pay your board and take you back to your home in
Maine. He thinks it is the best thing you can do."

With all the color stricken out of her face--dumb, still, white,
tearless, and rigid, she had been standing in her awful despair. But at
these last words she came back suddenly as it were from the dead.

"He said _that_?" she asked hoarsely. "He told you to take me back
there--like this?"

"He did."

"My curse upon him--my curse follow him through life!"

The