“I will go to my father at once.”
“Does he request you to do so in his letter? Look again. Pardon me, but he foresaw your impetuosity; and I have another note for Lady Lansmere, in which he begs her ladyship not to sanction your return to him (should you so wish) until he come or send for you himself. He will do so whenever your word has redeemed his own.”
“And do you dare to talk to me thus, and yet pretend to love me?”
Randal smiled ironically.
“I pretend but to wed you. Love is a subject on which I might have spoken formerly, or may speak hereafter. I give you some little time to consider. When I next call, let me hope that we may fix the day for our wedding.”
“Never!”
“You will be, then, the first daughter of your House who disobeyed a father; and you will have this additional crime; that you disobeyed him in his sorrow, his exile, and his fall.”
Violante wrung her hands.
“Is there no choice, no escape?”
“I see none for either. Listen to me. I love you, it is true; but it is not for my happiness to marry one who dislikes me, nor for my ambition to connect myself with one whose poverty is greater than my own. I marry but to keep my plighted faith with your father, and to save you from a villain you would hate more than myself, and from whom no walls are a barrier, no laws a defence. One person, indeed, might perhaps have preserved you from the misery you seem to anticipate with me; that person might defeat the plans of your father’s foe,—effect, it might be, terms which could revoke his banishment and restore his honours; that person is—”