"I know this, Clara; it is your mother's doing, and not your own. You could not bring yourself to be false, unless by her instigation."
"No," said she; "you are wrong there. It is not my mother's doing: what I have done, I have done myself."
"Is it not true," he asked, "that your word was pledged to me? Had you not promised me that you would be my wife?"
"I was very young," she said, falling back upon the only excuse which occurred to her at the moment as being possible to be used without incriminating him.
"Young! Is not that your mother's teaching? Why, those were her very words when she came to me at my house. I did not know that youth was any excuse for falsehood."
"But it may be an excuse for folly," said Clara.
"Folly! what folly? The folly of loving a poor suitor; the folly of being willing to marry a man who has not a large estate! Clara, I did not think that you could have learned so much in so short a time."
All this was very hard upon her. She felt that it was hard, for she knew that he had done that which entitled her to regard her pledge to him as at an end; but the circumstances were such that she could not excuse herself.
"Am I to understand," said Owen Fitzgerald, "that all that has passed between us is to go for nothing? that such promises as we have made to each other are to be of no account? To me they are sacred pledges, from which I would not escape even if I could."
As he then paused for a reply, she was obliged to say something.