With a sudden gesture of something
like entreaty, he cried out, as if his fate lay in her hands, "How will
it end? how will it end?"
"As it began--in sorrow, shame and loss." Then, in words that fell hot
and heavy on the sore heart made desolate, she poured out the dark
history of the wrong and the atonement wrung from him with such pitiless
patience and inexorable will. No hard fact remained unrecorded, no
subtle act unveiled, no hint of her bright future unspared to deepen the
gloom of his. And when the final word of doom died upon the lips that
should have awarded pardon, not punishment, Pauline tore away the last
gift he had given, and dropping it to the rocky path, set her foot upon
it, as if it were the scarlet badge of her subjection to the evil spirit
which had haunted her so long, now cast out and crushed forever.
Gilbert had listened with a slowly gathering despair, which deepened to
the blind recklessness that comes to those whose passions are their
masters, when some blow smites but cannot subdue. Pale to his very lips,
with the still white wrath, so much more terrible to witness than the
fiercest ebullition of the ire that flames and feeds like a sudden fire,
he waited till she ended, then used the one retaliation she had left
him. His hand went to his breast, a tattered glove flashed white against
the cliff as he held it up before her, saying, in a voice that rose
gradually till the last words sounded clear above the waterfall's wild
song:
"It was well and womanly done, Pauline, and I could wish Manuel a happy
life with such a tender, frank, and noble wife; but the future which you
paint so well never shall be his.
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