‘My dear! You don’t know what you are saying. You forget that this self-abandonment, and extravagant grief would be wrong in any one; and, if nothing else, the display is unbecoming in you.’
Laura’s over-wrought feelings could bear no more, and in a tone which, though too vehement to be addressed to a parent, had in it an agony which almost excused it, by showing how unable she was to restrain herself, she broke forth:——‘Unbecoming! Who has a right to grieve for him but me?—his own, his chosen,—the only one who can love him, or understand him. Her voice died away in a sob, though without tears.
Her mother heard the words, but did not take in their full meaning; and, believing that Laura’s undeveloped affection had led her to this uncontrolled grief, she spoke again, with coldness, intended to rouse her to a sense that she was compromising her womanly dignity.
‘Take care, Laura; a woman has no right to speak in such a manner of a man who has given her no reason to believe in his preference of her.’
‘Preference! It is his love!—his love! His whole heart! The one thing that was precious to me in this world! Preference! You little guess what we have felt for each other!’
‘Laura!’ Mrs. Edmonstone stood still, overpowered. ‘What do you mean?’ She could not put the question more plainly.
‘What have I done?’ cried Laura. ‘I have betrayed him!’ she answered herself in a tone of despair, as she hid her face in her hands; ‘betrayed him when he is dying!’
Her mother was too much shocked to speak in the soft reluctant manner in which she was wont to reprove.
‘Laura,’ said she, ‘I must understand this. What has passed between you and Philip?’
Laura only replied by a flood of tears, ungovernable from the exhaustion of sleeplessness and want of food. Mrs. Edmonstone’s kindness returned; she soothed her, begged her to control herself, and at length brought her into the house, and up to the dressing-room, where she sank on the sofa, weeping violently. It was the reaction of the long restraint she had been exercising on herself, and the silence she had been maintaining. She was not feeling the humiliation, her own acknowledgement of disobedience, but of the horror of being forced to reveal the secret he had left in her charge.