She tried to speak calmly, but her voice trembled with some inward resentment, and there was a passion of hatred in her dusky eyes that might have killed him where he stood. A rage as deadly as hers leaped up in his eyes in answer. "Because I _hate_ you!" he said, wickedly. "We always hate those whom we have wronged," she replied, and her whole form trembled with her passionate indignation. "I hate you because of that cowardly blow in the dark," he said angrily. "But for that I might have let you go free, though I pitied Captain Ernscliffe for being deceived by you." "Villain!" she exclaimed, "I have not deceived him!" "You have not?" he sneered. "Did you not withhold from him the story of that year which he supposed you to have spent in Europe? Did you not allow him to think you an innocent woman?" She sprang to her feet and stood facing him, her dark-blue eyes dilating, her cheeks flushing, her small hands clenched tightly in her breathless anger. An artist's pencil might have handed his name down to immortal fame could he have put on canvas that striking scene--the beautiful room, and the man in his splendid, insolent, satanic beauty, standing before that lovely incarnation of pride and passion, with her glorious veil of golden hair falling loosely about her superb form, and the shining folds of her costly bridal robe sweeping far behind her on the rich velvet carpet. "I _am_ an innocent woman," she said, proudly, and the light shone on her lifted face and the earnest fire in her eyes. "I _am_ an innocent woman! I have done no wrong, though I am a betrayed, unhappy, and insulted victim! I have been sinned against, but I have not sinned!" He laughed, cruelly, mockingly, insultingly. "Why do you laugh?" she said. "_You_ know that it is true. You deceived me and betrayed me, but was I to blame? I carried the marriage certificate in my breast as a precious thing! I thought it was true as Heaven, I thought I was pure as the snow! And I _am_! How could _your_ sin touch me?" Again he laughed mockingly. "Your mind is strangely warped," he said. "But if you were innocent in the one thing, how about the blow in the dark? Was there no sin in that?" "I deny that there was sin!" she said, with passionate defiance in her look and tone. "It was simple justice--'a blow for a blow.' You drove me mad with the horror and cruelty of all I learned! It seemed to me that I was given back from the grave to rid the world of a monster!" "You failed," he said, derisively. "Yes, to my sorrow," she answered. "But, ah! Leon Vinton, surely a day of reckoning will come to you. The justice of God will not always sleep. I was not permitted to take your punishment out of His hands who has said 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay.' It will come, it will come!" "You prate of God's vengeance," he said, sneeringly, "but it suits you to forget that the preachers call him also a God of mercy, and love, and forgiveness!"