The Widowed Bride — page 220: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE WIDOWED BRIDE, 211 CHAPTER XXX. LADY GLENHAMPTON’S CONFESSION. In the corridor, a few hundred feet beyond the canopied door of the blue drawing-room, Theodore Poynings met Lady Glenhampton, coming with her usual slow, graceful manner, toward him. Her face was very pale and drawn, like one who has passed through the crisis of a long sick- ness, but she smiled as she looked into his face. ‘“‘Mr. Poynings,” she said, ‘‘we parted, just now, in anger, but perhaps we did not sufficiently consider—— “Your blandishments are all thrown away, Countess of Glenhampton,” interrupted Poynings, speaking in a voice that was more like the shriek of a wild animal than the tone of a human being. ‘‘It is too late now for you to attempt to come to terms—your guilty secret is betrayed! Go on your way, my proud countess—all the world will soon know the mystery of the blood-stains on your jeweled hands?’ He passed by her without another word, but he could read in her blanched features and paralyzed attitude the sweet fullness of his revenge! Unable to fully comprehend his words, yet secretly im- pressed with their terrible import, Lady Glenhampton went on tothe blue drawing-room and opened the door, feeling that rest and solitude must be gained at once, or her throb- bing brain would burst! She must have time to think and plan—she must have a season alone with herself to contem- plate this new and frightful complication of affairs. As she came into the stately apartment, her eves fixed in- tently on the floor, and her head drooping on her breast, she became vaguely conscious of another’s presence in the room, and looked up—to meet the stern and fiery gaze of her husband. “‘Adelbert!’ she exclaimed, and with the instinct of sub- tle diplomacy that still clung to her, the tones of her voice grew deliciously sweet, ‘‘my dearest lord! this isa pleasure I had not expected.” She came forward with a bright smile and outstretched arms, but he shrank back as if her radiant beauty were the hideous repulsiveness of a charnel-house, Eomichbooks (ele) mn