“_Pure name!_” burst forth the furious man, recklessly. “Doubtless you are very proud of it—the name that you should bear instead of the one you do. But I have had my revenge, or at least a part of it; for, if through her obstinacy I lost the glory which should have been mine, I did not suffer alone—she was driven out, a nameless outcast, from her ancestral home, never to enter there again, while her proud inheritance descended to another branch of the family, though I don’t know who, and made her offspring a beggar. If she had only told me that night in London,” he went on, talking more to himself than to any one else, “I would gladly have married her on the spot. But she didn’t; when she found I wouldn’t compromise myself, she let her pride ruin both her and me; and _how_ I have hated her ever since. But her suffering was the greater, and I know her sensitive soul must have nearly died within her at the idea of entailing her disgrace upon her offspring. Ah! if I could have found her after that, I’d have made her pay the penalty for cheating me so,” he concluded, with intense bitterness, remembering what he had lost. “Do not forget that _you_ were the traitor,” Earle said. “You lured her on to destruction with soft words and smiles; you won her pure heart, and tempted her into a secret marriage, professing to love her as simple Marion Vance, and for the innocent love she lavished upon you. You did all this to _amuse_ yourself and _pass away an idle summer_. She believed you, and trusted in your honor, and she gloried in her secret, because of the joyful surprise she would be able to give you when you should go with her to her father to confess that she was your wife. If you had been true to her, if you had not tried to play that dastardly trick upon her, you might have attained to the greatness which your mean and ambitious soul coveted. You _cheated yourself_, and now the meanest of all traits that weak human nature is heir to is revealed in you—_you hate the one you sought to injure, simply because you overreached yourself, and the wrong recoiled in a measure upon you_.” Sumner Dalton glared angrily at him, for Earle read his degraded nature like an open book, and it was by no means pleasant to be compelled to view the picture he had drawn. “You appear to know all about your mother’s history,” he said at last, with some curiosity.