Lady Evelyn — page 241: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

234 Mutual Confession. tried so hard—Heaven knows I did! I respected you, ad- mired you, esteemed you—’’ “Everything but loved me; and you demand your tfree- dom now? Well, Lady Evelyn, I force no woman to wed me; I set you free. Only I made the same mistake you did yourself. I fancied La Rose de Castile superior to mortal weakness—‘a creature all too bright and good for human nature’s daily food’—an angel, the hem of whose garment I was unworthy to touch; and | find—wiil you pardon nry rudeness in saying. it?—a finished and perfect coguette, who flings aside a lover or a faded bouquet, when they grow ?riste, with equal high-bred indifference. May I ask the name of my fortunate—successor ?” The most gentle of gentlemen, the most courteous of courtiers, can be mercilessly cruel when they _ choose. Trevannance would not have laid a rude finger on the coarsest hag that ever dishonored the name of woman, yet with his soft, slow words he could stab to the core the proud heart of the lady he professed to worship. She looked up, all her Castilian fire flashing in her great eyes, and growing red in her before pale cheeks. “You do well,” she said, laying her right hand on her throbbing breast, “to remind me how false, how misera- bly weak I have been. I deserve your reproaches; but you might have spared me that one taunt. I do not ask for freedom. I ask for nothing but—but your forgive- ness, if you are great enough to grant that. Evelyn Des- mond does not give her word one hour, and withdraw it the next. All I have promised I am ready to fulfill—to be your wife to-morrow, if you demand it. And the honor of the man I wed, whoever he be, will be dearer to me than my life. Not for my own sake, but for yours, have I told you this. Do you think I do not feel the bitter degradation of such a confession as this? Do you think you can despise me half as deeply as I despise myself ?” He listened to the impassioned words with a face of emotionless calm. — ‘And the man who has supplanted me,’ he said, his low _ tones a strange contrast to the suppressed passion of hers, “is the friend I trusted, the hero ‘without reproach,’ Colone! Drummond!” | ‘She turned from him and hid her face, a cry brealsing ae _ from her lips—such a cry of sharp, cruel pain ac boc elds,