"But I am not your wife."
"What does it mean? Have I not been patient with you? Have I been hard to you, or cruel? Have you heard anything of me that is to my discredit?" She shook her head, eagerly. "Then what does it mean? Are you aware that you are proposing to yourself to make an utter wreck of me—to send me adrift upon the world without a purpose or a hope? What have I done to deserve such treatment?"
He pleaded his cause very well,—better than she had ever heard him plead a cause before. He held her still by the hand, not with a grasp of love, but with a retention which implied his will that she should not pass away from out of his power. He looked her full in the face, and she did not quail before his eyes. Nevertheless she would have given the world to have been elsewhere, and to have been free from the necessity of answering him. She had been fortifying herself throughout the morning with self-expressed protests that on no account would she yield, whether she had been right before or wrong;—of this she was convinced, that she must be right now to save herself from a marriage that was so distasteful to her.
"You have deserved nothing but good at my hands," she said.
"And is this good that you are doing to me?"
"Yes,—certainly. It is the best that I know how to do now."
"Why is it to be done now? What is it that has changed you?"
She withdrew her hand from him, and waited a while before she answered. It was necessary that she should tell him all the tidings that had been conveyed to her in the letter which she had received from her cousin Walter; but in order that he should perfectly understand them and be made to know their force upon herself she must remind him of the stipulation which she had made when she consented to her engagement. But how could she speak words which would seem to him to be spoken only to remind him of the abjectness of his submission to her?
"I was broken-hearted when I came here," she said.
"And therefore you would leave me broken-hearted now."