Page:In the Roar of the Sea.djvu/391

Rh and if unmarried, you are free—and if free, ready to elope with——" he would not utter the name in his quivering fury.

"I pray you," said Judith, offended, "do not insult me."

"I—insult you? It is a daily insult to me to be treated as I have been. It is driving me mad."

"But, do you not see," urged Judith, "you have offered me two alternatives and I ask for a third, yours are jail or an asylum, mine is exile. Both yours are to me intolerable. Conceive of my state were Jamie either in jail or with Mr. Scantlebray. In jail—and I should be thinking of him all day and all night in his prison garb, tramping the tread-mill, beaten, driven on, associated with the vilest of men, an indelible stain put, not on him only, but on the name of our dear, dear father. Do you think I could bear that? or take the other alternative? I know the Scantlebrays. I should have the thoughts of Jamie distressed, frightened, solitary, ill-treated, ever before me. I had it for a few hours once and it drove me frantic. It would make me mad in a week. I know that I could not endure it. Either alternative would madden or kill me. And I offer another—if he were in exile, I could at least think of him as happy among the orange groves, in the vineyards, among kind friends, happy, innocent at worst, forgetting me. That I could bear. But the other no, not for a week—they would be torture insufferable." She spoke full of feverish vehemence, with her hands outspread before her.

"And this smiling vision of Jamie happy in Portugal would draw your heart from me."

"You never had my heart," said Judith.

Coppinger clinched his teeth. "I will hear no more of this," said he.

Then Judith threw herself on her knees, and caught him and held him, lifting her entreating face toward his.

"I have undergone it—for some hours. I know it will madden or kill me. I cannot—I cannot—I cannot," she could scarce breathe, she spoke in gasps.

"You cannot what?" he asked, sullenly.

"I cannot live on the terms you offer. You take from me even the very wish to live. Take away the arsenic