and stunted what he should have been! Are you
rewarded, now, for your years of trouble?'

'Oh, Miss Dartle, shame! Oh cruel!'

'I tell you,' she returned, 'I WILL speak to her. No power on earth
should stop me, while I was standing here! Have I been silent all these
years, and shall I not speak now? I loved him better than you ever loved
him!' turning on her fiercely. 'I could have loved him, and asked no
return. If I had been his wife, I could have been the slave of his
caprices for a word of love a year. I should have been. Who knows it
better than I? You were exacting, proud, punctilious, selfish. My love
would have been devoted--would have trod your paltry whimpering under
foot!'

With flashing eyes, she stamped upon the ground as if she actually did
it.

'Look here!' she said, striking the scar again, with a relentless hand.
'When he grew into the better understanding of what he had done, he saw
it, and repented of it! I could sing to him, and talk to him, and show
the ardour that I felt in all he did, and attain with labour to such
knowledge as most interested him; and I attracted him. When he was
freshest and truest, he loved me. Yes, he did! Many a time, when you
were put off with a slight word, he has taken Me to his heart!'

She said it with a taunting pride in the midst of her frenzy--for it
was little less--yet with an eager remembrance of it, in which the
smouldering embers of a gentler feeling kindled for the moment.

'I descended--as I might have known I should, but that he fascinated me
with his boyish courtship--into a doll, a trifle for the occupation
of an idle hour, to be dropped, and taken up, and trifled with, as the
inconstant humour took him. When he grew weary, I grew weary. As his
fancy died out, I would no more have tried to strengthen any power I
had, than I would have married him on his being forced to take me for
his wife. We fell away from one another without a word. Perhaps you saw
it, and were not sorry. Since then, I have been a mere disfigured piece
of furniture between you both; having no eyes, no ears, no feelings,
no remembrances. Moan? Moan for what you made him; not for your love. I
tell you that the time was, when I loved him better than you ever did!'

She stood with her bright angry eyes confronting the wide stare, and the
set face; and softened no more, when the moaning was repeated, than if
the face had been a picture.

'Miss Dartle,' said I, 'if you can be so obdura