"I do it, Minnie, to save you," her cousin replied, looking on the ground, and half-sighing as she spoke. "I dread your being led into some entanglement with—with—Mr. Tremenhere."
"And if I loved him, Dora, what then?"
"Oh, 'twould be a disgrace—an irretrievable, false step!" cried the other in agitation. "Think what he is! A man without name, position, character, perhaps—what do you know of him?"
"And what do you know against him, Dora?" asked Minnie, no longer sobbing, but in a low, firm voice.
"This—that, in my opinion, no honourable family should forget its dignity, and become allied to a blighted name, a name with the stain of——"
"Do not say that!" exclaimed her cousin, rising with energy, and pacing the room for an instant; then, as suddenly stopping before Dora, she continued, "Do not so harshly, and I am sure unjustly, judge a fellow-sister. 'Tis only in the hand of Time, the fate which may await ourselves; perhaps, calumnies we may suffer from—innocent now, innocent then, too. Dora, I love that man; I never knew how well, until I weighed it by my tears. I love him the deeper for every one I have shed this day for him!"
Dora was very pale, and did not reply.
Minnie continued: "Why do you hate him so much? Why did you seek him? Dora, dear Dora, tell me that!" She knelt before her cousin, on a stool at her feet, and, taking both hands, looked up in her face.
For some moments Dora was painfully silent. "No," she thought, "I will not tell her how weak I once was, in nearly loving him." This was the war within her. "I met him," she said at last, aloud, evading the first question, "because I feared you might love him. He bore the character, in Florence, of a reckless man—such a man as you, my innocent cousin, should not marry; I sought and begged him to quit this place and you!"
"Oh!" cried Minnie, blushing at the picture before her mind's eye, "he must have fancied I had spoken of him with love, and we had scarcely met then, except as strangers. I hope he does not think this now. How could you have sought him for such a motive as that?—how touch on so delicate a subject?"