As she made no response, he seated himself at her side. Then he moved up a little nearer to her, as doubtless he had done in earlier days. The lady retreated to the farthest end of the divan. This movement did not please the practised diplomate, and he rose from his seat, taking a standing position in front of her. Louis was near enough to hear what the captain said, and to see what both of them did; and the last action on the part of his mother was particularly satisfactory to him. “Won’t you speak to me, Maud?” asked Scoble in a tone disconsolate enough to come from a graveyard. “I have nothing to say,” she replied, bestowing upon him a glance as blank as any coquette could have given in the practice of her art. “You have nothing to say to me after a separation of two years, two long years that seemed endless to me?” said the melancholy master of the Maud. “Nothing at all. I wish the separation had been fifty years longer,” replied the lady in a tone that satisfied the son that all was going well at the other end of the cabin. “O Maud! Can it be you who speak to me in this cruel manner?” “You can have no doubt that it is I. If you have, I add that I have earnestly hoped I should never see your face again,” returned the lady, with vim enough to satisfy the interested listener near the pantry. “Am I so changed? Is my face odious to you now?” groaned the captain. “Your face is the same; but you are all face: there is nothing of you but face. There is nothing at all behind it. You are utterly hollow and wicked.” “O Maud! How can you be so cruel! Am I not your husband?” “No!” she almost shouted, as she sprang from the divan, and stood in front of him, looking him squarely in the eye this time. “Did I not lead you to the holy altar in your own church? Were we not made one by your own minister?” demanded Scoble, becoming even more impressive as he proceeded. “Never!” exclaimed Mrs. Belgrave in a loud and firm tone, such as Louis had never heard her use before. “Have you forgotten the scene in the church?” he asked in a low, solemn tone. “I have not forgotten it; for it was then that I was cheated, robbed of my name, and led into a trap by a villain!” replied the lady. “The marriage, as you call it, was a fraud, and long ago I ceased to regard it as a marriage. It was a sacrilege, a profanation of the holy temple in which the farce was acted.” “Still, _you_ became my wife at that time,” added Scoble with a tinge of triumph in his tone. “I became your victim, not your wife!” “We lived together as man and wife for over two years,” suggested the captain, who was rapidly coming up from his boots, and abandoning his graveyard elocution. “I did not know you then. I do know you now; and there would be no excuse for me before God or man if I recognized you as my husband. The marriage was a fraud, and the law dissolved it from the beginning.”