"My dear Lance, we all know what a boy's first love is. Ah, do believe me, it is not worth thinking of; every one laughs at a boy's love. They take it just as they take to whooping-cough or fever; it does not last much longer either. In another year's time you will laugh at the very mention of what you have called love. Believe me," continued her ladyship, proudly, "that Lady Marion is the wife Heaven ordained for you, and no other."
The handsome young head was bent low, and it seemed to my lady as though a great tearless sob came from his lips. She laid her hand on his dark, crisp waves of hair.
"I do sympathize with you, Lance," she said, in a kind voice; and when Lady Lanswell chose to be kind no one could rival her. "You have, perhaps, made some little sacrifice of inclination, but, believe me, you have done right, and I am proud of you."
He raised his haggard young face to hers.
"I feel myself a coward and a villain, mother," he said, in a broken voice. "I ought to have gone back to that poor girl; I ought not to have dallied with temptation. I love Leone with the one love of my heart and mind, and I am a weak, miserable coward that I have not been true to her. I have lost my own self-respect, and I shall never regain it."
My lady was patient; she had always expected a climax, and, now it had arrived, she was ready for it. The scorn and satire gave place to tenderness; she who was the most undemonstrative of women, caressed him as though he had been a child again on her knees. She praised him, she spoke of his perfidy as though it were heroism; she pointed out to him that he had made a noble sacrifice of an ignoble love.
"But, mother," he said, "I have broken my faith, my honor, my plighted word," and her answer was:
"That for a great folly there could only be a great reparation; that if he had broken his faith with this unfortunate girl he had kept it, and his loyalty also, to the name and race of which he was so proud, to herself and to Lady Marion."
Like all other clever women, she could argue a question until she convinced the listener, even against his own will, and she could argue so speciously that she made wrong seem right.
He listened until he was unable to make any reply. In his heart he hated and loathed himself; he called himself a coward and a traitor; but in his mother's eyes he was a great hero.