The actual words which passed we know not, but, after a very brief interval of careless converse on the part of Garcia--something he said earnestly, and in the tones of pitying sympathy, which caused the cheek and lips of Marie to blanch to marble, and her whole frame to shiver, and then grow rigid, as if turned to stone.

Could it be that the fatal secret, which she believed was known only to herself and Arthur, that she had loved another ere she wedded Ferdinand, had been penetrated by the man towards whom she had ever felt the most intense abhorrence?
and that he dared refer to it as a source of sympathy--as a proof that he could feel for her more than her unsuspecting husband?
Why was speech so frozen up within her, that she could not, for the moment, answer, and give him back the lie?
But that silence of deadly terror lasted not long: he had continued to speak; at first she was unconscious of his change of tone, words, and even action; but when his actual meaning flashed upon her, voice, strength, energy returned in such a burst of womanly indignation, womanly majesty, that Garcia himself, skilled in every art of evil as he was, quailed beneath it, and felt that he was powerless, save by violence and revenge.
While that terrible interview lasted, the wife of Morales had not failed; but when once more alone, the most deadly terror took possession of her.

She had, indeed, so triumphed as to banish Garcia, defeated, from her presence; but fearful threats of vengeance were in that interview divulged--allusions to some secret power, over which he was the head, armed with authority even greater than that of the sovereign's--mysteriously spoken, but still almost strangely intelligible, that in her betrayal or her silence lay the safety or the danger of her husband--all compelled the conviction that her terror and her indignation at the daring insult must be buried deep in her own breast; even while the supposition that Don Luis knew all the past (though how, her wildest imagination could not discover), and that therefore she was in his power, urged her yet more to a full confession to her husband.

Better if his heart must be wrung by her, than by a foe; and yet she shrunk in anguish from the task.
She was, however, deceived as to the amount of Garcia's knowledge of her past life.

Accustomed to read human nature under all its varied phases--employing an unusually acute penetration so to know his fellows as to enable him, when needed, to create the greatest amount of misery--he had simply perceived that Marie's love for her husband was of a different nature to his for her, and that she had some secret to conceal.