“I hope you will never speak to anyone else in this manner,” said Hamilton, gravely. “You would make people suppose you had been guilty of some serious misdemeanor.”
“I have been guilty of a misdemeanor,” said Hildegarde, despondingly, “and one which I should think it necessary to confess to the Baroness Waldorf before I entered her house; having done so, I conclude she would refuse to resign her daughter to my care. To avoid the merited mortification, I shall go home, tell everything to Hortense, and be guided by her advice for the next year or two. And now,” she added, “I have only one thing more to observe, and that is, that we ought to repair our thoughtlessness as well as we can, or, rather, avoid a continuation of it, by separating at once. I shall return to Mayence to-morrow, and you must go on to England.”
“I will go to—Scotland, if you will go with me, Hildegarde,” said Hamilton. “Don’t be angry, I am not joking. I have listened to the subject of your two hours’ meditation, and now I expect you to listen to mine.” And he entered into a long and, all things considered, not very prejudiced exposition of the state of his affairs—informed her of the £5,000 pounds which he should inherit in two years, and after hoping that they could contrive to buy something and live somewhere with that sum, ended, as he had begun, by proposing her going with him to Scotland, and then returning to her mother until he could claim her altogether.
She listened in silence, the expression of deep attention changing by degrees into surprise and perplexity. It was the first time that the idea of a marriage with him had entered her mind; she had taught herself to consider it so completely an impossibility that his occasional outbursts of passion or tenderness had ceased to make any impression on her. Ashamed of the confession which she had so ingenuously made to him just before, and not prepared for the sudden change of feelings which his words produced, she turned away, and when he paused for an answer, did not even make an attempt to speak.
As Hamilton waited in vain for an answer, his former doubts became certainties—she liked, but did not love him. With a difficulty in utterance, in strong contrast to his former fluency, he now stammered out his hopes that he had not deceived himself as to the nature of her feelings towards him.
“No—oh no,” answered Hildegarde, but without turning round.
“And you do or will try to love me sufficiently to——”
“Why force me to make unnecessary confessions,” she said, with a deep blush; “rather let me ask you when you heard that you would inherit this fortune which makes you independent. In Frankfort, perhaps?”
“No,” replied Hamilton, “I knew it when I was a child, and considered it then, though not quite a fortune, certainly a very large sum of money.”
“And is it not a very large sum of money?”