“I do not need any,” said Elsie proudly. “I find myself able to survive even your sister’s insults.”
“Do not refer to them. Helen has a great many false ideas, but you ought not to punish me for them. I have never willingly harmed you.”
“Yes, you have!” Elsie broke out impetuously. “Did not I beg of you to let me alone, to keep to your own devices and let ‘Elsie the cook’ go her own way?”
A pained look overspread Herbert’s face as he answered: “If I have wronged you, Elsie, I offer you as honorable a reparation as any man can offer a woman.”
“And do you think because, to please your own fancies, you have despoiled me of a chance to earn my bread, I can accept so great a condescension? I had rather starve than be made the recipient of any man’s tardy sense of honor.”
Stung, but not baffled, Herbert answered: “I loved you almost from the first time I saw you. I sought to win your regard with a scrupulous sense of honor, and if this offer of my hand is tardy, it is only because you have so persistently kept me at bay. Elsie, I beg you to forget my sister’s taunts and let me prove how devotedly I can make amends for the suffering I have caused you. Margaret, help me to prove how true my statements are.”
Herbert turned, only to find that Margaret had slipped away. “Elsie, darling,” he added, going up to her and attempting to take her in his arms, “I cannot believe, after last night, that you do not, at least cannot, love me. I was the happiest man last night that ever sat in the glow of the fire-light and drew pictures of the future. If we had not been interrupted I should have told you then all that I tell you now. Elsie! Elsie! trust me to make you happy.”
But Elsie drew herself away from the outstretched arms and sheltered herself behind an intervening rocker. “I cannot,” she said resolutely, although the pleading tones no less than the supplicating eyes had well-nigh broken her composure. “Even could I so compose my heart as to contemplate the possibility which you picture, there is an insurmountable obstacle in the way.”
“And that is?”
“Your sister! Never will I enter a family, were it ten times mightier than the one you represent, where I could be the object of such undeserved scorn as was heaped upon me this morning.”