"No," said Hubert doggedly, "it is not."
She shrugged her graceful shoulders.
"It should be, I think. But I will go on. I look three-and-twenty, but you know as well as I do that I am twenty-nine. In another year I shall be thirty—horrible thought! An attack of illness, even a little more trouble, such as this that I have lately undergone, will make me look my full age. Do you know what that means to a woman?" She pressed her eyelids and the hollows beneath her eyes with her fingers. "When I look in the glass, I see already what I shall be when I am forty. I must make the best of my youth and of my good looks. You spoiled one chance in life for me; I must make what I can of the other."
"You mean," said the young man, with white dry lips, which he vainly attempted to moisten as he spoke—"you mean—that you must make what the world calls a good marriage?"
She bowed her head.
"At last you have grasped my meaning," she said coldly; "you have hitherto been exceedingly slow to do so."
He looked at her silently for a moment or two, almost with abhorrence. Her fair and delicate beauty affected him with a sort of loathing; he could not believe that this woman with the cold lips and malignant eyes had been born of his mother, had played with him in childhood, had kissed him with loving kisses, and spoken to him in sisterly caressing fashion. It took him some minutes to conquer the terrible hatred which grew up within him towards her, as he remembered all that she had been and all that she had done; but, when at last he was able to speak, his voice was calm and studiously gentle.
"Florence," he said, "I will not forget that you are my sister. You bear my name, you come of my race, and, whatever you do and whatever you are, I cannot desert you. I promised our mother on her death-bed that I would care for you as long as you needed care; and, if ever you needed it in your life, you need it now! I have not done my duty to you during the past few weeks. I have left you to yourself, and thought I could never forgive you for what you had done. But now I see that I was wrong. If it would be of any service to you, I would make a home for you at once—I would place all my means at your disposal. Come back with me to London, and let us make a home for ourselves together. We are both weary, both have suffered; could we not try to console and strengthen each other?"
The wistfulness of his tone, of his looks, would have softened any heart that was not hard as stone. But Florence Lepel's pale face was utterly unmoved.
"You offer me a brilliant lot," she said—"to live in a garret, I suppose, and darn your stockings, while you earn a paltry pittance as a literary man, eked out by aunt Leo's charity! You know very well that sooner than do that I put up for two years with Marion Vane's patronage and the drudgery of the schoolroom! And now, when the woman who alternately scolded and cajoled me, the woman who once took it upon her to lecture me for my behavior to her husband, the woman whom I hated as I should hate a poisonous snake—when that woman is slowly dying and leaving the field to me, am I to throw up the game, give up my chances, and go to vegetate with you in London? You know me very little if you think I would do that."