“And yet brings you here—steals you away from your innocent home, to—to”——
I could not go on, grief and indignation stifled me.
“He does not deserve this—I will not hear it!” she cried, breaking from me. Her sweet face flushed red and warm through the tears that streamed over it, and her eyes flashed a defiant glance into mine. “Say what you will of me, I am wicked, cruel, worse—worse, if it pleases you to say it; but as for him, did I not tell you, Zana, that I loved him? I do—I do better than life, better than my own soul, better than ten thousand friends like you, than ten thousand fath——oh, my God, I did not say that—no, no, I dare not say that.”
I sat down by the table, shocked and almost in despair. She crept toward me, and sinking down to the floor, laid her head upon my lap, exhausted by this outbreak of passion.
“Hush, Cora, hush, and let us talk quietly a little,” I said, after a pause, during which we both cried bitterly together, as we had often done over our petty sorrows in childhood. “Tell me, darling—don’t, don’t cry so—tell me why it is that this man does not make you his wife?”
“Don’t ask me about that—don’t, don’t—he is afraid of Lady Clare, he expects everything from her.”
“I know it—I know it well; but”——
She interrupted the bitter speech on my lips.
“Oh, she is a terrible woman, Zana, and he fears her so much; she has got everything that ought to be his, and would quite crush him if she suspected anything before all is settled between them.”
How beautiful she looked with her pleading eyes, soft with love and dim with tears—so unconscious, too, of her terrible position, so confiding—my heart ached for her.