Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/182

158 What instinct was it that told him to set his foot lightly on the stair, or was it only that he hoped to look down upon her for a moment, unseen? The sound of voices reached him, and leaning over, he saw two figures standing before the fire which the evening chill had rendered necessary-Miss Croydon and Tremaine. He started abruptly to descend, when he caught a sentence that made him pause.

“I’m not in the least like that,” Tremaine was saying, and though the voice was carefully repressed, it had in it a ring of savage earnestness. “In your heart you know it, or you wouldn’t stand there listening. I have come to you at once, boldly, because I’m sure that I shall win. He is not worthy of you—in your heart you know that, also. He cannot hold you; he is too weak; I shall wrench you away! You’re not the woman to be tied to a gilded mediocrity. You have fire—ah! I have studied you—you need a larger outlook upon life. You’ve been kept in a cage—you’ve never had a chance to be yourself. Here, you will never have the chance—with me, it would be different. You do not know how different! At Paris, at Vienna, at Rome”

She had been leaning away from him, staring into the fire, as though charmed into silence by this impetuous eloquence. Now, she stood erect and looked at him.

“What you are proposing to me is infamous,” she said, through clenched teeth.

“It is not in the least infamous,” he retorted coolly. “I am offering you the future I know you sigh for. It is a future that I sigh for, too; that I have sighed