The path of honor: A tale of the war in the Bocage

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

“And after you have finished?”

“Oh—then—you may do as you please.”

“I promise!” I cried, the blood bounding madly through my veins.

“It seems that your betrothed is a wilful and headstrong creature,” she began, “and when the time came to prepare to marry you she rebelled. She had been permitted to form ideas of her own. She refused to give herself to a man she had never seen, or whom she remembered only as a thin and unattractive boy. So the day before you were to arrive, having failed to exact from her father the promise that the right of choice should be left to her——”

“Yes, he told me,” I interrupted.

“But he did not tell you that she fled?”

“Fled!” I repeated. “Then that is the reason she is not here.”

“I am sure she would never have done it,” my companion continued; “however irregular her training—would never perhaps have thought of a step so desperate, but for a book she happened to find one day in her father’s library. She was attracted first by the illustrations, which were by Gravelot and very beautiful; then she became absorbed in the story, a translation from the English, which related the adventures of a young lady who ran away from her father to avoid a marriage into which he would have forced her.[B] The results of this flight proved so fortunate,—for by it she won the man she really loved,—that Mlle. de Benseval resolved to emulate it. So she mounted her horse one morning and instead of taking her usual ride, dismissed her groom and spurred away to the house of a friend who, she knew, would sympathize with her and perhaps intercede with her father.”

“Oh, it was with him she was in love!” I murmured.

“Not in the least, monsieur; she was in love with no one, and this friend was a woman. But that very evening, strangely enough, she met some one whom she fancied she might love; and in the days that followed, when they were much together, she was drawn very near to him; for she saw that he loved her truly. And at last, in a moment of trial when he held her in his arms, she confessed that she loved him in return.”