“You, resent his self-will!” she exclaimed. “ You , injured by his haughty temper! You , who opposed to both, when your hair was grey, the qualities which made both when you gave him birth! You , who from his cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have been! Are you rewarded, now , for your years of trouble?”
“Oh, Miss Dartle, shame! Oh cruel!”
“I tell you,” she returned, “I will speak to her. No power on earth should stop me, while I was standing here! Have I been silent all these years, and shall I not speak now? I loved him better than you ever loved him!” turning on her fiercely. “I could have loved him, and asked no return. If I had been his wife, I could have been the slave of his caprices for a word of love a year. I should have been. Who knows it better than I? You were exacting, proud, punctilious, selfish. My love would have been devoted—would have trod your paltry whimpering under foot!”
With flashing eyes, she stamped upon the ground as if she actually did it.
“Look here!” she said, striking the scar again, with a relentless hand. “When he grew into the better understanding of what he had done, he saw it, and repented of it! I could sing to him, and talk to him, and show the ardour that I felt in all he did, and attain with labour to such knowledge as most interested him; and I attracted him. When he was freshest and truest, he loved me . Yes, he did! Many a time, when you were put off with a slight word, he has taken me to his heart!”
She said it with a taunting pride in the midst of her frenzy—for it was little less—yet with an eager remembrance of it, in which the smouldering embers of a gentler feeling kindled for the moment.
“I descended—as I might have known I should, but that he fascinated me with his boyish courtship—into a doll, a trifle for the occupation of