"Of course," said Claude sullenly, "I cannot run away with you against your will. If you insist upon it, I will do as you ask; but it is making a terrible simpleton of me."
"You will forgive me," she returned. "You will say afterward that I acted rightly. I shall be miserable, Claude—I shall never be happy again—if I do not return home."
"If you persist in this, we shall be parted forever," he said angrily.
"It will be best," she replied. "Do not be angry with me, Claude. I do not think—I—I love you enough to marry you and live with you always. I have blinded myself with romance and nonsense. I do not love you—not even so much as that poor woman loves her husband. Oh, Claude, let me return home."
She looked up at him, her face wet with tears, and an agony of entreaty in her eyes.
"You might have found this out before, Hyacinth. You have done me a great wrong—you have trifled with me. If you had said before that you did not love me, I should never have proposed this scheme."
"I did not know," she said, humbly. "I am very sorry if I have wronged you. I did not mean to pain you. It is just as though I had woke up suddenly from an ugly dream. Oh, for my dear mother's sake, take me home!"
He looked down at her, for some few minutes in silence, vanity and generosity doing hard battle together. The sight of her beautiful, tearful face touched, yet angered him, he did not like to see it clouded by sorrow; yet he could not bear to think that he must lose its loveliness, and never call it his own.
"Do you not love me, Hyacinth?" he asked sadly.
"Oh, no—not as I should love you, to be your wife. I thought I did not, but you said I did. I am quite sure of it, Claude; ever since we started I have been thinking so."