Mr.
Hurdlestone, instead of denying or palliating the charge, even boasted
of his guilt, and entered into a minute detail of each revolting
circumstance--the diabolical means that he had employed to destroy her
peace.
This fiend, to whom in an evil hour she had united her destiny, had
carefully intercepted the correspondence between herself and Algernon,
and employed a friend in India to forge the plausible account he had
received of her lover's death--and finally, as the finishing stroke to
all this deep-laid villany, he had overcome his avaricious propensities,
and made Elinor his wife, not to gratify a sensual passion, but the
terrible spirit of revenge.
Poor Elinor! For a long time her reason bowed before the knowledge of
these horrible facts, and when she did at last recover her senses, her
beauty had faded beneath the blight of sorrow like the brilliant but
evanescent glow of the evening cloud, which vanishes at the approach of
night. Weary of life, she did not regret the loss of those fatal charms
which had been to her a source of such misery.
The last time the rose tint ever visited her once blooming cheeks was
when suddenly informed by Mr. Hurdlestone of his brother's marriage with
a young lady of large fortune. "May he be happy," she exclaimed,
clasping her hands together, whilst the deepest crimson suffused her
face.
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