“Ah! If it might only heal!”
He sighed, and shook his head, with a look of commiseration.
“What do you mean?” she asked, alarmed—“that there is no cure possible?”
“I’m sorry for you, in truth I am,” he said despondently, “if you still love him as you admit, and I wish I could think that your policy of silence, or your policy of jealousy, or your policy of anything in the world would bring Philip Stanhope to his senses. But, alack, my dear! I fear ’tis all thrown away upon him, and that his inconstancy is irreclaimable. Why, at this very moment, while you are calculating a means to his reformation, he is, to my knowledge, scheming to have to his house here a country fancy of his, one Molly Davis, whom he calls his cousin.”
She heard and stiffened.
“A country fancy!”
“O! I breathe no wrong of her,” he said; “and she may be his cousin—left-handed—for all I know. A sprightly wench, at least, that somehow met and tickled his humour; and he’ll have her to stay with him on that plea of kinship. But it’s for you to question him, if you will.”
“I!” The white scorn of her! the lifted lip, and wrinkle in the little nose! “Did you not hear me say I had sworn never to speak to him again?”
“Conditionally, that was.”
“No longer. Never, and never, and never. In this house! Before my very face. O, it cannot be true!”