had ever felt the most
intense abhorrence? and that he dared refer to it as a source of
sympathy--as a proof that he could feel for her more than her
unsuspecting husband? Why was speech so frozen up within her, that she
could not, for the moment, answer, and give him back the lie? But that
silence of deadly terror lasted not long: he had continued to speak;
at first she was unconscious of his change of tone, words, and even
action; but when his actual meaning flashed upon her, voice, strength,
energy returned in such a burst of womanly indignation, womanly
majesty, that Garcia himself, skilled in every art of evil as he was,
quailed beneath it, and felt that he was powerless, save by violence
and revenge.

While that terrible interview lasted, the wife of Morales had not
failed; but when once more alone, the most deadly terror took
possession of her. She had, indeed, so triumphed as to banish Garcia,
defeated, from her presence; but fearful threats of vengeance were in
that interview divulged--allusions to some secret power, over which
he was the head, armed with authority even greater than that of
the sovereign's--mysteriously spoken, but still almost strangely
intelligible, that in her betrayal or her silence lay the safety or
the danger of her husband--all compelled the conviction that her
terror and her indignation at the daring insult must be buried deep in
her own breast; even while the supposition that Don Luis knew all the
past (though how, her wildest imagination could not discover), and
that therefore she was in his power, urged her yet more to a full
confession to her husband. Better if his heart must be wrung by her,
than by a foe; and yet she shrunk in anguish from the task.

She was, however, deceived as to the amount of Garcia's knowledge of
her past life. Accustomed to read human nature under all its varied
phases--employing an unusually acute penetration so to know his
fellows as to enable him, when needed, to create the greatest amount
of misery--he had simply perceived that Marie's love for her husband
was of a different nature to his for her, and that she had some secret
to conceal. On this he had based his words: his suspicions were,
unhappily, confirmed by the still, yet expressive agony they had
occasioned. Baffled, as in some measure he had been, his internal rage
that he should have so quailed before a woman, naturally increased the
whirlwind of contending passions: but schooled by his impen