"There it is. I knew it, I expected it: not an hour together, and she fears me already."
She turned abruptly, drew close to her cousin's side, and stealing both arms around her, murmured in a voice of ineffable sadness,
"Don't, Bessy—dear, dear Bessy, don't be afraid of me. Is it not enough that I am afraid of myself? Now, tell me what this thing is! So that it is not about the dead, I can listen and be pleased."
"About the dead? Why, Abby, how strangely you talk! What have you and I in common with the dead? The sunshine is not pleasanter than life is to me since, since—"
"Since when, Bessie?"
"Since he loved me."
A strange sort of wonder crept over Abigail Williams. She looked upon her cousin with vague apprehension. The word love was a new thing to her; it had scarcely yet entered into her dreamy life. Elizabeth smiled at first amid her blushes, but as Abby kept gazing upon her with parted lips and that wonder in her eyes, her lips began to tremble, and the warm color ebbed away from her face.
"I forget," she said, deprecatingly, "you have not heard any thing about him. I could not write, and even my father knew nothing till he came to Boston after me. But oh! if you could see him, Abby! If you could hear him speak; or read his beautiful poetry that he writes; it would not seem strange that I love him so much."
"Then you have been treacherous also? You love some one more than me?"
"Forgive me, forgive me," pleaded Elizabeth, "I could not help it. We were in the same house—he was like a son to Lady Phipps."