"I have long known that he has loved you well."
"But it can never be," she said, "if my father is to be carried away to this fearful place. People would say that you had hurried him off in order that Jack—"
"Would you believe it, Eva?" said I, with indignation.
"It does not matter what I would believe. Mr Grundle is saying it already, and is accusing me too. And Mr Exors, the lawyer, is spreading it about. It has become quite the common report in Gladstonopolis that Jack is to become at once the owner of Little Christchurch."
"Perish Little Christchurch!" I exclaimed. "My son would marry no man's daughter for his money."
"I do not believe it of Jack," she said, "for I know that he is generous and good. There! I do love him better than any one in the world. But as things are, I can never marry him if papa is to be shut up in that wretched City of the Dead."
"Not City of the Dead, my dear."
"Oh, I cannot bear to think of it!—all alone with no one but me with him to watch him as day after day passes away, as the ghastly hour comes nearer and still nearer, when he is to be burned in those fearful furnaces!"
"The cremation, my dear, has nothing in truth to do with the Fixed Period."
"To wait till the fatal day shall have arrived, and then to know that at a fixed hour he will be destroyed just because you have said so! Can you imagine what my feelings will be when that moment shall have come?"