"If you must know," he replied, "my mother would have refused to
sanction such a marriage as that."
"No matter how good the girl might have been?"
There was something defiant--almost threatening--in her tone. Horace was
annoyed--and he showed it when he spoke.
"My mother would have respected the girl, without ceasing to respect
herself," he said. "My mother would have remembered what was due to the
family name."
"And she would have said, No?"
"She would have said, No."
"Ah!"
There was an undertone of angry contempt in the exclamation which made
Horace start. "What is the matter?" he asked.
"Nothing," she answered, and took up her embroidery again. There he sat
at her side, anxiously looking at her--his hope in the future centered
in his marriage! In a week more, if she chose, she might enter that
ancient family of which he had spoken so proudly, as his wife. "Oh!" she
thought, "if I didn't love him! if I had only his merciless mother to
think of!"
Uneasily conscious of some estrangement between them, Horace spoke
again. "Surely I have not offended you?" he said.
She turned toward him once more. The work dropped unheeded on her lap.
Her grand eyes softened into tenderness. A smile trembled sadly on her
delicate lips. She laid one hand caressingly on his shoulder. All the
beauty of her voice lent its charm to the next words that she said to
him. The woman's heart hungered in its misery for the comfort that could
only come from his lips.
"_You_ would have loved me, Horace--without stopping to think of the
family name?"
The family name again! How strangely she persisted in coming back to
that! Horace looked at her without answering, trying vainly to fathom
what was passing in her mind.
She took his hand, and wrung it hard--as if she would wring the answer
out of him in that way.
"_You_ would have loved me?" she repeated.
The double spell of her voice and her touch was on him. He answered,
warmly, "Under any circumstances! under any name!"
She put one arm round his neck, and fixed her eyes on his. "Is that
true?" she asked.
"True as t he heaven above us!"
She drank in those few commonplace words with a greedy delight. She
forced him to repeat them in a new form.
"No matter who I might have been? For myself alone?"
"For yourself alone."
She threw both arms round him, and laid her head passionately on his
breast. "I love you! I love you!! I love you!!!" Her voice rose with
hysterical vehemence at each repetition of the words--then suddenly sank
to a low hoarse cry of rage and despair. The sense of her true position
toward him revealed itself in all its horror as the confession of her
love escaped her lips. Her arms dropped from him; she flung herself back
on the sofa-cushions, hiding her face in her hands. "Oh, leave me!" she
moaned, faintly. "Go! go!"