Yet the heart of each sister misgave her as they sat in a solemn conclave, and summoned Elizabeth before it. She came, rosy, bright-eyed, fresh from talks with her lover and happy dreams of a brilliant future, which they were to share together. She stood listening in apparent indifference, while Miss Cornelia faltered out the painful result of their inquiries. And when the worst was told, she had turned perhaps a trifle pale, but otherwise she seemed unmoved.
"I don't know why you tell me all this, auntie," she said, slowly. "I—I am sorry to hear it, but it can make no difference."
"No difference!" Miss Cornelia repeated, stupefied. "No difference, Elizabeth?"
"No, it can't change my love for him," she said, defiantly. "He told me that he has enemies at Chicago, and that you would probably unearth a lot of old scandals; and I promised that it should make no difference. Perhaps some of them are true; I don't care. Auntie, I can't—I can't give him up," she went on with a sudden change of tone and clasping her hands appealingly. "I tried to once before, and—I couldn't. If he were to go away now and leave me, I—I should die. I couldn't bear to go on living without him." The girl's face was flushed, her voice tremulous with feeling; it was evident that she fully meant—or thought that she meant—what she said. Her aunts looked at her in helpless perplexity.
"My darling," Miss Cornelia faltered at last, "think how much better it is to give him up now than to—to marry him and be unhappy. You don't know—men are very bad;—one reads such things in the newspapers. If he were to ill-treat you, desert you."
"Ah, but he won't," said Elizabeth, smiling incredulously. "You needn't worry, Aunt Cornelia; we shall be very happy. But even if we were not," she concluded, with a sudden burst of defiance. "If I thought that he would beat me, treat me like a dog—I don't care; I should marry him to-morrow."
And she thrust out her full under lip, and stood facing them, with a look of obstinacy on her fair, girlish face, that for the moment bore a strong resemblance to her father.
To Miss Cornelia's mind there rose again, with startling vividness, the events of twenty years before. The recollection seemed to endow her with an unwonted and unnatural strength. She went over to where Elizabeth stood and took both the girl's hot hands in hers.
"Elizabeth," she said, desperately, "you don't know what you're saying. You will be miserable if you marry that man. You don't know what it is to live with a person who is beneath you, who—who drags you down. We know, my darling, we have seen it. Be warned by us, and give him up."
Miss Cornelia had never in all her gentle life spoken with so much vehemence. Elizabeth, in her astonishment, stood for a moment absolutely passive. She stole a glance at Miss Joanna; she was weeping quietly. Elizabeth's own face worked, her lip quivered. "I know whom you mean," she broke out, suddenly, in a quick hard voice. "You're thinking of my mother." And then, in the dismayed pause that followed, she dragged her hands away from Miss Cornelia's grasp and fled from the room.