"You are wrong," he returned inflexibly. "But I would sooner see you suffer than give yourself up to a habit which is destroying you by inches. It is no kindness on Scott's part to let you do it."
"Don't talk of Scott!" she said quickly. "No one--no one--will ever know what he is to me--how he has helped me--while you--you have only looked on!"
Her voice quivered. She flung out a restless arm. Instantly, yet without haste, he took and held her hand. His fingers pressed the fevered wrist. He spoke after a moment while he quelled her instinctive effort to free herself. "I am not merely looking on to-night. I am here to help you--if you will accept my help."
"You are here to torture me!" she flung back fiercely. "You are here to force me down into hell, and lock the gates upon me!"
His hold tightened upon her. He leaned slightly towards her. "I am here to conquer you," he said, "if you will not conquer yourself."
The sudden sternness of his speech, the compulsion of his look, took swift effect upon her. She cowered away from him.
"You are cruel!" she whispered. "You always were cruel at heart--even in the days when you loved me."
Sir Eustace's lips became a single, hard line. His whole strength was bent to the task of subduing her, and he meant it to be as brief a struggle as possible.
He said nothing whatever therefore, and so passed his only opportunity of winning the conflict by any means save naked force.
To Isabel in her torment that night was the culmination of sorrows. For years this brother who had once been all the world to her had held aloof, never seeking to pass the barrier which her widowed love had raised between them. He had threatened many times to take the step which now at last he had taken; but always Scott had intervened, shielding her from the harshness which such a step inevitably involved. And by love he had never sought to prevail. Her mental weakness seemed to have made tenderness from him an impossibility. He could not bear with her. It was as though he resented in her the likeness to one beloved whom he mourned as dead.
Possibly he had never wholly forgiven her marriage--that disastrous marriage that had broken her life. Possibly her clouded brain was to him a source of suffering which drove him to hardness. He had ever been impatient of weakness, and what he deemed hysteria was wholly beyond his endurance; and the spectacle of the one being who had been so much to him crushed beneath a sorrow the very existence of which he resented was one which he had never been able to contemplate with either pity or tolerance. As he had said, he would rather see her suffering than a passive slave to that sorrow and all that it entailed.