"
He waited, with his eyes fixed on the face of Sir Oswald's wife. But
during the whole of his speech she had never once looked at him. She
had never withdrawn her eyes from the eastern horizon. Passionless
contempt was expressed by that curving lip, that calm repose of eye and
brow. It seemed as if this woman's disdain for the plotting villain
into whose power she had fallen absorbed every other feeling.
Victor Carrington waited in vain for some reply from those scornful
lips; but none came. He took out his cigar-case, lighted a cigar, and
sat in a meditative attitude, smoking, and looking down moodily at the
black chasm below the base of the tower. For the first time in his life
this man, who was utterly without honour or principle--this man, who
held self-interest as the one rule of conduct--this unscrupulous
trickster and villain, felt the bitterness of a woman's scorn. He would
have been unmoved by the loudest evidence of his victim's despair; but
her silent contempt stung him to the quick. The hours dragged
themselves out with a hideous slowness for the despairing creature who
sat watching for the dawn; but at last that long night came to an end,
the chill morning light glimmered faint and gray in the east. It was
not the first time that Sir Oswald's wife had watched in anguish for
the coming of that light. In that lonely tower, with her heart tortured
by a sense of unutterable agony, there came back to her the memory of
another vigil which she had kept more than two years before.
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