"You are deceiving me," she said. "You are trying to win me by a pretended knowledge of facts that do not exist."
"On my honor, no," he replied. "I admit that I am selfish, and that I am using the knowledge I possess to gain my own ends, but on the morning that you give me your hand in marriage I swear that I will place in your hands the documents that will prove your mother a lawfully-wedded wife, and give you a legal right to your father's name and wealth. Moreover, I assure you that no one will be more surprised or rejoiced than your father himself on learning the truth."
"And what if I refuse to marry you? she asked, fearfully.
"If you refuse," he replied, cruelly, "the cloud of shame shall never be lifted from your mother's life and yours. Nay, more, I will go to the Stuarts and your good friend, Mrs. Leslie, and I will tell them why you choose to make a mystery of your past. Consent to marry me, and on our wedding-day I will prove you the legal inheritor of an honorable name and a great fortune. I will give you until to-morrow to decide the question."
He rose with the words and walked abruptly away.
Irene remained sitting like one stunned on the banks of the beautiful river.
Her white hands clasped each other convulsively in her lap, her head drooped on her breast, she stared blankly and dreamily before her, seeming lost to the beauty of the fair Italian scene, and deaf to the soft sounds that filled the air with a pleasant murmur.
Heart and brain were in a terrible tumult.
Her head ached and throbbed almost to bursting, her heart beat fast and hard in her breast.
The joy and triumph she would have experienced in the knowledge of her poor mother's innocence and honor were all damped by the thought of the costly price she was required to pay before she could have the happiness of bearing the glad tidings to the wronged, unhappy woman.
With deepest self-reproach the girl recalled her own frenzied reproaches to that beautiful, sorrow-stricken parent on the fatal night when she had been so maddened by the revelation of the angry Bertha. She looked back as though years had intervened upon the Irene of that summer night as a rude, impertinent, willful child.
"Is it any wonder my mother left me to the death I courted in my wild despair?" she thought. "How could I, who should have soothed sorrow, turned upon her so cruelly? Poor, unhappy Ellie, as I used to call her, what sorrows may she not be enduring now? What insolence, what cruelty, at the hands of her overbearing mother and sister? Even I, her child, did not spare her my reproaches in her dark hour, and how should they who love her less than I did?"