"Oh, Hepworth, how cruel! how wicked! Tell me truly, were you going without a word?"
Clara had clasped both hands over her lover's arm, and was slowly leading him back, with her face uplifted in sweet reproachfulness to his, and drawing deep, long sighs of thanksgiving that she had him there, chained by her linked hands.
"I do not know. How can I tell? Your father has dismissed me from his house."
"He has? I thought as much; and thinking so, came after you—but only to say that I love you dearly—ten times more since this has happened—and nothing on earth shall ever make me marry any other person."
Hepworth looked down into that generous face, and his own took a softer expression in the moonlight.
"Your father is against us," he said. "I think it must be open defiance, or separation—at any rate, for a time."
Clara's face clouded. She loved her father, and was a little afraid of him as well; but that was nothing to the passionate attachment she felt for Hepworth Closs. She would have defied the whole world rather than give him up; but open disobedience was a terrible thing to her. All at once she brightened.
"Some day, you know, I shall be my own mistress. We can wait. I am so young. When I am Countess of Carset, come and claim me. No one can stand between us then."
She spoke firmly, and with the dignity of deep feeling, standing upright and looking bravely into his face, as if she were a peeress already, and was ready to pledge all the honor of a long race of ancestors for the faith that was in her.
"Ah, if you were only the bright, handsome girl you seem, with no dignity to keep up, no belongings but your own sweet self, how grateful I should be! From this night, Clara, we would never part."