He was smiling now. The idea that the slim woman, dressed in black, sitting before him, with the red and white coming and going in her cheeks, could seriously resist him really seemed preposterous to him. Elizabeth remained silent, and Clavering knew that silence in a woman is momentous. As she made no reply he said, after a long pause, “And how about that other man?”
Elizabeth had said no word in her letter about any one else, and started at Clavering’s words. “I—I—” She could get no farther. It was in the beginning only a shrewd surmise of Clavering’s, but Elizabeth’s faltering words and shrinking manner had confirmed it.
“I knew, of course, another man had turned up; that’s why I came post–haste,” coolly remarked Clavering. “Now tell me all about him.”
Elizabeth was forced to answer. “It is—there was—my husband’s cousin, Major Pelham.”
“Oh, yes; the fellow that persecuted you after your husband’s death. He, however, is hardly the man to interfere with me.”
“I—I don’t understand it quite. I thought he knew all that was being done. But I had a cablegram from him.”
“Before. And when I got his reply by cable I wrote you.”
“Major Pelham has not asked me to marry him,” replied Elizabeth, with dignity.
“But he will. Elizabeth, you are promised to me. I told you I loved you—not in the flowery style of a young loon, but of a man who has worked and thought and fought and seen enough to make him know his own mind. Of course I can’t coerce you, but the man who gets you away from me may look out for himself. See, the habits of a man’s early life and thought never leave him. My first instinct has always been to take care of my own, and I was bred and made my mark in a country where neither wife–stealing nor sweetheart–stealing is permitted. Sometimes wives and sweethearts were stolen, but it was a dangerous business. Oh, I don’t mean to use a gun; that went out twenty–five years ago. But there are many ways of ruining a man—and a woman, too.”
He spoke quite pleasantly, sitting close to Elizabeth and holding his crape–covered hat in his hand. There was nothing to indicate vengeance in Clavering’s easy, graceful manner and charming voice, but Elizabeth shuddered at the truth of what his speech might mean.