"Why didn't you, then?" and Melinda turned sharply upon him, with a look
in her black eyes which made him wince as he replied: "Family
interference--must have money, you know! But, zounds! don't I pity
her!--tied to that clown, whom--"
Frank did not finish the sentence, for Melinda's eyes fairly blazed with
anger as she cut him short with "Excuse me, Mr. Van Buren; I can't
listen to such abuse of one whom I esteem as highly as I do Judge
Markham. Why, sir, he is head and shoulders above you, in sense and
intellect and everything which makes a man," and with a haughty bow,
Melinda swept away, leaving the shamefaced Frank alone in his
discomfiture.
"I'd like to kick myself if I could, though I told nothing but the
truth. Ethie did want me confoundedly, and I would have married her if
she hadn't been poor as a church mouse," Frank muttered to himself,
standing in the deep recess of the window, and all unconscious that just
outside upon the balcony was a silent, motionless form, which had heard
every word of his conversation with Melinda, and his soliloquy
afterward.
Richard Markham had come to this party just to please Melinda, but he
did not enjoy it. If Ethie had been there he might; but he could not
forget the blank that day received, or the letter from James, which said
that Ethelyn was not looking as well as usual, and had the morning
previously asked him to turn back before they had ridden more than two
miles. He could not be happy with that upon his mind, and so he stole
from the gay scene out upon the balcony, where he stood watching the
quiet stars and thinking of Ethelyn, when his ear had caught by the
mention of her name.
He had not thought before who the couple were standing so near to him,
but he knew now it was Melinda and Frank Van Buren, and became an
involuntary listener to the conversation which ensued. There was a
clenching of his fist, a shutting together of his teeth, and an impulse
to knock the boasting Frank Van Buren down; and then, as the past
flashed before him, with the thought that possibly Frank spoke the truth
and Ethelyn had loved him, there swept over him such a sense of anguish
and desolation that he forgot all else in his own wretchedness. It had
never occurred to him that Ethelyn married him while all the time she
loved another--that perhaps she loved that other still--and the very
possibility of it drove him nearly wild.
He was missed from the party, but no one could tell when he left, for no
one saw him as he sprang down into the garden, and taking refuge in the
paths where the shades were the deepest, escaped unobserved into the
street, and so back to his own room, where he went over all the past
and recalled every little act of affection on Ethelyn's part, weighed it
in the balance with proofs that she did not care for him and never had.
So much did Richard love his wife and so anxious was he to find her
guiltless that he magnified every virtue and excused every error until
the verdict rendered was in her favor, and Frank alone was the
delinquent--Frank, the vain, conceited coxcomb, who thought because a
woman was civil to him that she must needs wish to marry him; Frank, the
wretch who had presumed to pity his cousin, and called her husband a
clown! How Richard's fingers tingled with a desire to thrash the
insulting rascal; and how, in spite of the verdict, his heart ached with
a dull, heavy fear lest it might be true in part, that Ethie had once
felt for Frank something deeper than what girls usually feel for their
first cousins.