"Not altogether induced," she protested; "helped perhaps."
"Helped, then—influenced—by outside considerations?"
"Yes," she assented, with heroic truthfulness.
"You were alluding to this discovery, of course?"
"Yes."
"And you have consented to marry me in order that I may not be deprived of my property?" She did not speak immediately, from purely physical incapacity, and he went on with a hardening voice. "I will not be married on those grounds, Elizabeth. You must have known that I would not."
For a moment she stood with her face hidden, struggling with a rising tide of tears that, when these terrible words were spoken, would not be kept in check; then she lifted her head, and flung out her arms, and clasped him round his great shoulders. (It is not, I own, what a heroine should have done, whose duty was to carry a difficulty of this sort through half a volume at least, but I am nevertheless convinced that my real Elizabeth did it, though I was not there to see—standing, as she did, within a few inches of her lover, and with nothing to prevent their coming to a reasonable understanding.) "Oh," she cried, between her long-drawn sobs, "don't cast me off because of that horrid money! I could not bear it now!"
"What!" he responded, stooping over her and holding her to his breast, speaking in a voice as shaken as her own, "is it really so? Is it for love of me only, my darling, my darling?"—pouring his long pent-up passion over her with a force that seemed to carry her off her feet and make the room spin round. "Would you have me if there was no property in the question, simply because you feel, as I do, that we could not do without each other? Then we will be married to-morrow, Elizabeth, and all the world shall be welcome to brand me a schemer and fortune-hunter if it likes."
She got her breath in a few seconds, and recovered sufficient consciousness to grasp the vanishing tail of those last words.
"A fortune-hunter! Oh, how preposterous! A fortune-hunter!"