"He is your friend, Walter; yes, your true and loyal friend—more loyal than I have been as your wife."
"What disloyalty have you practised towards me?" he demanded, grasping her by the shoulder, looking into those frightened eyes of hers with his honest steady gaze, the look of a man who would read all secrets in her face, even the worst. "What has there ever been between you and Bothwell which could involve disloyalty to me? Don't lie to me, Valeria! There must have been some meaning in that man's speech. He would not have dared so to have spoken if he had not known something. What has Bothwell been to you?"
"He loved me—" faltered the pale lips.
"And you returned his love?"
She only hung her head for answer, the beautiful head on the slim and graceful throat, circled with that string of pearls which had been her husband's last birthday gift.
"You returned his love, and you encouraged him to come to your husband's house, to be your chosen companion at all times and seasons, the 'nice boy' of whom you spoke so lightly as to disarm suspicion. By Heaven, I would as soon have suspected your footman as Bothwell Grahame!"
"He was never more to me than a friend. I knew how to respect myself," she answered, with a touch of sullenness.
"You knew how to respect yourself, and you spent half your days in the society of a lover! Is that your idea of self-respect? It is not mine. You respected yourself, and you were careful of your own interests so far as to refrain from running away with the man you loved. What need of an elopement, when the sands must soon run down in the hourglass, and the gray-haired veteran would be gone, leaving you a rich widow, free to marry the man of your heart? No need to defy the world, to outrage society, when everything would work round naturally to give you your own way. O Valeria, it is hard for a man to have his eyes opened after years of blissful blindness! I was better off as your dupe than I am as your confessor."
He laughed bitterly, a contemptuous laugh, at the thought of his own folly. To think that he had believed it possible this woman could love him—this lovely, spiritual creature, all light and flame; to suppose that such a woman could be happy as an old man's darling, that this young bright soul could be satisfied with the worship of declining years, the steady glow of affection, constant, profound, but passionless! No, for such a soul as this the fiery element was a necessity. Love without passion was love without poetry.
Well, the dream was over. He could believe that this proud woman had not dishonoured him, that she could stand before the eyes of men stainless, a faithful wife, as the world
