He found Bruce that night, and told him all. He never would give an account of that interview: it must have been a curious one.
_"xunômosan gar, ontes echtistoi to prin, pur kai thalassa--"_
Fancy the well-iced conventionalities of the one brought in contact with the other's savage temperament, maddened by baffled desires and the sense of shameful defeat.
Before noon the next day it was announced to Lady Catharine, at Kerton Manor, that Bruce was waiting for her in the drawing-room. It was with a diffidence and sense of guilt very strange to her pure, straightforward nature that she obeyed the summons.
"I can not tell you how sorry I am," she began.
Bruce turned toward her his ghastly face, ravaged and deformed by passion and sleeplessness, like a cane-brake in the Western Indies over which a tornado has passed. He did not appear to notice her words or her offered hand, but spoke in a strange, broken voice, after clearing his parched throat once or twice, huskily:
"I have not the least idea. Bella gave no hint of this. Would you like to see her note?" and she held it out to him.
The name appeared to sting him like the cut of a whip, for he started convulsively as he took the scrap of paper. He read it through more than once, as if unable to comprehend it; the power of discrimination seemed blasted in his dry, red eyeballs; they could only glare.
He made it out at last, and crumpled it up in his hand, clenching it till the knuckles became dead-white under the strain.
"We were to have been married this day month," he said to himself, in a hoarse whisper; then raising his voice, "You can guess, at least, which route they have taken?"
"Indeed I can not," she answered; "I would have done any thing to prevent this; but you must see that pursuit now would be worse than useless; it could only lead to fresh evils."
Then the smouldering passion burst into a flame.
"It is false," he cried out; "you would have done nothing. It is a plot. You are all in it; you, your son, and more that I will know soon. I saw it from the first moment I set foot in this cursed house. And you think I will not be revenged? Wait--wait and see!" He spoke rapidly, but it seemed as if the words could hardly force their way through his gnashing teeth.