"Fool that I was to be so deceived! Light and fickle that you are, you are not worthy to be enshrined in an honourable man's heart. I will thrust your image from mine, until not a trace, not a recollection of it, is left. I thank God it will be no impossible task. The spell that bound me to you is broken. Deceitful, worthless girl, thus to have betrayed your false heartedness at the last: but better for me to have discovered it before marriage than after. I thank you for this, basely treated as I have been." She made an effort to interrupt him, a weak, broken-hearted effort; but his fierce torrent of speech overpowered it. "I go now; and, in leaving this place, shall leave its memories behind. _I will never willingly think of you again in life_. Contemptuously as you have cast off me, so will I endeavour in my heart to cast off you, and all remembrance of you. I wish you good-bye, for ever. And I hope, for de la Chasse's sake, your conduct to him, as a wife, may be different from what it has been to me." There was a strange, overwhelming agony, both of body and mind, at work within her, such as she had never experienced or dreamt of; a chaos of confused ideas, the most painful of which was the conviction that he was leaving her for ever in contempt and scorn. A wild desire to detain him; to convince him that at least she was not the false-hearted being he had painted her; to hear some kinder words from his lips, and _those_ recalled, crowded to her brain, mixing itself up with the confusion and despair already there. With his mocking farewell he had hastened from the room by way of the colonnade; it was the nearest way to the path leading to his home, and he was in no mood to stand upon ceremony. Adeline went after him, but his strides were quick, and she did not gain upon his steps. She called aloud to him, in her flood-tide of despair. He turned and saw her, flying down the steps after him. One repellent, haughty gesture alone escaped him, and he quickened his pace onwards. She saw the movement of contempt; but she still pressed on, and got halfway across the lawn. There she sank upon the grass, at first in a kneeling posture, her arms outstretched towards him, as if they could bring him back, and a sharp, wailing cry of anguish escaping from her lips. Why did he not look round? There was just time for it, ere he was hidden in the dark shrubbery: he would have seen enough to drive away his storm of anger. But waxing stronger in his wrath, he strode on, without deigning to cast another glance behind.