"I have many things to say, but assent is not one of them;" in a voice that, though low, seemed to cleave the air with a steely ring. "You think you love me. Perhaps you do—as far as you are capable of loving any thing beside yourself. You have seen a good deal of me this summer, and have made up your mind to marry. I possess some of the necessary requirements, and doubtless suit you better than any mere fashionable woman. But you have none of that intense desire that makes a matter of life and death of love, that elects one woman, or forever keeps a vacant niche in the soul."
"Sylvie!"
Her passionate words stunned him. He turned to her with a puzzled look, a certain helplessness, as if he were stranded on some far, foreign shore. And then he met her lustrous eyes, so clear that they were almost pitiless in the glow of undimmed truth.
"Can you not trust me?" with the gentle reproachfulness so winning to most women, so confident of a victory over a heart that loves.
"I could trust you to care for no other woman when your word was passed, but it seems to me," and her heart swelled with something like contempt, "that you are but playing at love. Marriage in your estimation is a fit and proper step: your mother likes me, you prefer me to any one else"—
"Good heavens, Sylvie! what more do you want?" and a flood of scarlet mounted his calm, handsome brow. "When a man chooses a woman out of the whole circle of his friends and acquaintances, what higher compliment can he pay her? I have seen women beside those in Yerbury; and, though it may savor of vanity, I believe there are those who would appreciate"—
"I wonder you did not go to them;" with a fine irony, cutting short his sentence.
"Because I liked you, chose you."
"I do not so desire to be chosen," she answered quickly. "The man I marry must win my respect, my highest faith; must have an aim, an ambition, and not dawdle through life as some silly woman might."
The decisive voice seemed to cut a path between him and her as it went. It struck home uncomfortably.