“No!”

The word came direct from her breaking heart, but, because of its very intensity, it was low and subdued.

Trafford started slightly, then smiled; he thought she was jesting; that, girl-like, she wanted him to ask the question again. He stood silent, and looking at her. Beauty unadorned is all very well, but beauty attired in a Worth dress of soft black lace, with diamonds glistening in its hair, gives the unadorned article very long odds. Esmeralda was a vision of loveliness as she stood in the light of the window; that light which is so trying to imperfect features and faulty complexions, but which only serves to accentuate the charms of a loveliness like Esmeralda’s. It fell upon the bronze-gold hair and lighted it up until it shone softly; it fell upon her olive-pale face and touched it with a warm tint, rose on ivory; and it revealed the depth and the color of the wonderful eyes shaded by the long lashes.

Trafford’s heart leaped as he told himself that this marvel of Nature was his bride, his very own, and that she loved him!

His emotion kept him silent for nearly a minute, then he said, with a smile:

“This is the first time I have heard you plead guilty to unhappiness, Esmeralda. I am glad it was only in jest; you—”

“It was not in jest,” she said; “I am very unhappy.”

[183]

The smile died slowly from his face, leaving his eyes last, as he looked at her.

“I don’t understand,” he said, gravely but gently. “Do you feel lonely—dull? I suppose a girl—just taken from her friends, and entering on a new life—must feel it. But, dearest, you are with me, with your husband—”

“Yes,” she said, almost inaudibly. “That is it.”

He stood and gazed at her with a presentiment of coming ill; and he noticed, for the first time, that her lips were compressed and her brows drawn straight, as they always were when she was serious or troubled about anything.

“Esmeralda!” he said, in amazement. “My dear one, you—you are not serious?” He took her hand and held it caressingly, soothingly. “Such words hurt me, though they are only in jest. You can not be serious. And yet—let me look at you!”

She did not resist as he drew her round slightly so that he could see the whole of her face, but she was passive only, and her eyes looked over his head and beyond him with a dull kind of resentment.

“Something has happened to trouble you,” he said, very gently—“something since we arrived. What is it? Don’t you like this place, the servants? What is it? We need only stay the night; we need not stay even so long if you would rather go. Tell me, Esmeralda.”

“The place is very well,” she said, and her voice came slowly, painfully. “I do not wish to go—unless—”

“Unless—what?” he asked. “Be frank with me, dearest. You should have no thought that I do not share. You say that you are unhappy. Great heavens! I can scarcely believe my ears.” He tried to smile. “You know that all my life is devoted to making you happy. Tell me what is wrong?”

“Do you wish me to tell you?” she asked.

His surprise grew at her tone and manner.

“I do wish it,” he said, gravely. “There should be no secret concealments between us, dearest.”

“You think that, you say that,” she said, with a kind of sad bitterness. “Would you answer me frankly, truthfully, if I were to ask you a question, Lord Trafford?”

“‘Lord Trafford!’” he said, raising his brows. “Why do you call me by my title, Esmeralda? For God’s sake, let us get to the bottom of this mystery at once, for it is a mystery to me. Of course I will answer you, and frankly and truthfully. I am not in the habit—” He checked himself and spoke more gently. “What is it, dear one?”

[184]

“Why did you marry me?”

The face opposite him was that of a girl, the voice that of a woman struggling with pain and misery. He started and dropped her hand, and the color flew to his face, then left it, and left it paler than before.

“That is a strange question,” he said in a low voice, and with a ghost of a smile. “A strange question from one’s bride and at such a time. Have you forgotten that we were married only a few hours ago?”

“I have not forgotten,” she said, and her voice was altogether sad now. “But answer me: you promised.”

He laughed, but with an undercurrent of uneasiness.

“I will, if you must have it. I married you because I love you.”

Her eyes flashed; the Three Star spirit flamed up within her.

“It is a lie!” she said, not loudly, but with terrible distinctness.

Trafford’s face went white, and he stood for a moment, breathing hard and looking at her as if he had not heard her aright.

“What—what is that you say, Esmeralda?” he asked, almost inaudibly.

“That is not true—and you know it!” she said. “Wait; I don’t want you to answer me, to talk to me as if I were a child, an ignorant girl. I—I should hate to have you lie to me. Besides, it is too late.”

He stood like a man bewildered by a sudden blow.

“Too late!” he echoed, mechanically.

“Yes,” she said, with a little catch in her voice. “Oh, if it were not—if it only were not! Lord Trafford, it—it is not my fault that we were married. I only knew the truth afterward—soon afterward; but it was afterward. I know now—now that it is too late—that you married me for—for—”

She paused; the shameful words threatened to choke her.

“Go on,” he said, with an awful calmness.

—“For my money!” she said in a whisper, and with downcast eyes, as if it were she who was guilty.

He did not start, but a hand seemed to grasp his heart. It was so true—and truth is often so ghastly, so all-powerful and insurmountable.

“How—who—”

“Ah, you admit it,” she said, sadly as if she had hoped, even against hope, that he would deny it, even in the face of[185] the truth. “I will not tell you how I learned it. But it is the truth; you can not deny it!”

She put her hand to her lips for a moment, as if to steady them, for they were quivering.

“It was not me, but—but the money you wanted,” she went on. “All the time you have—perhaps, hated me; have been laughing at me even while you—you have been saying—saying—”

Her voice broke. She remembered—it flashed upon her at that instant—how few loving, really loving, speeches he had made to her.

“I ought to have known,” she faltered. “But I did not. How should I? brought up in a diggers’ camp. And there was no one like you at Three Star, no one who thought of such things. I was just ignorant, and—and believed you.”

“My God!” he murmured, under his breath. He understood all she was feeling; and he shared her agony of shame and humiliation. Another man might have turned to her and lied to her, fluently declaring that he had loved her from the first; but Trafford could not do that. It would have seemed to him as if he were insulting her and mocking her misery.

“I believed you,” she went on, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “I thought you—you cared for me—”

“Esmeralda!” broke from him; then as he met her sorrowful gaze, he stopped and turned his head away.

“When you took me down to Belfayre, and they were all so good to me, I didn’t understand, I didn’t guess the truth. And the duke talked as if he were rich, as if money—money was not even thought of. And you—you seemed”—her voice broke—“as if you could not do or even think anything mean and— It is just that; I didn’t understand.”

Her bosom heaved, and her eyes, dry and burning, gazed vacantly at the sky, now reddening with the setting sun.

“But I know all now. Ever since I found out the truth I have been thinking—thinking until I thought I should go mad! All the way here, while you thought I was asleep, I was going over it all, and my eyes were opened, and I—I understood! It was the money you wanted; and not only you, but the duke, and Lord Selvaine, and Lilias—” Her voice grew thick.

“No—no!” he exclaimed, hoarsely. “Not Lilias!”

“Yes,” she said, sadly; “I blame her more than the rest, for she is a girl, a woman, and understood. She knew I was ignorant and didn’t know the ways of the world; but she is a[186] great lady, and she ought to have been above—above sacrificing me!”

The word stung him like the cut of a whip. His lips set tightly; but he said nothing. What could he say?

“You all thought of yourselves and your family pride, and—nothing of me!” she went on, after a pause. “I was only a nobody, something little more than the girls who work in the fields: why, I am little better!”

He spoke at last.

“Esmeralda—be just; I—no one of us but respected, admired—”

“I know,” she said, with a deep sigh. “My money made you forget what I was. Lady Wyndover used to say that it was no matter what I did. I didn’t understand that, among other things, but I do now. And I do not blame her for the part she has played.”

She spoke with a kind of calm, pitying contempt.

“She could not help doing what she did, being what she is. She thought that nothing mattered so that I was a marchioness, and would be a duchess some day. I do not blame her, though—though she has been as cruel as the rest of you!”

She was growing weary under the strain, and she leaned against the window, and for a moment let her head rest against it, but for a moment only.

“I suppose most girls would not mind. But I expect I&............