“Oh, here she is!” said a voice at a little distance—the far from welcome voice of Percy Joscelyn. “Aimée, we are waiting for you.”
It chanced that Kyrle was thinking of this conversation and all that it had suggested the next day as, having left the party in a church engaged in inspecting, with blank amazement, some frescoes of Carpaccio which Mr. Ruskin has held up to the admiration of the world, he went out on the little piazza before the church and sat down on the steps which led down to the canal, to wait for them. As he sat there in the soft Venetian sunlight he was of two moods—one to go quickly, at once, out of a temptation which had become overmastering; the other, to cast all scruples to the winds, and show these people—who fancied, forsooth, that their stratagems and devices had any power to restrain him—how little such barriers of straw would stand in his way did he once resolve to take that way. Some one, who came quietly out of the church and sat down beside him, thought that at this moment he looked more like the old, masterful Lennox Kyrle than he had looked since she had seen him under these new conditions.
“I wonder,” said Fanny Meredith, “if you are by this time aware that you are a very foolish man?”
He turned and looked at her. “I have been aware of it for a long time,” he answered, quietly.
“And is not the knowledge of folly the beginning of wisdom? Are you not sorry now that you refused my good offices?”
“Did I refuse them? I am not sure of it. But, if so, the reason holds good now as then, which made it impossible for me to accept them. You urged me to come forward as a suitor to your cousin, and I told you that I was too poor a man to think of doing so. My position has not changed since then.”
“But if you don’t see the folly of that, you are not at the beginning of wisdom,” said she, impatiently. “Why, according to your fancy, only rich people should ever marry rich people; when, on the contrary, it should really be the other way! The proper equalizing of wealth demands that rich persons should marry poor ones.”
He was not in a mirthful mood, but to refrain from laughing at this was impossible. “It is a new thing for you to appear in the character of a political economist,” he said. “Your theory is well enough, and I find no fault with those who practice it. But I must decline to be one of the poor persons who aid in the equalization of wealth by such means.”
“Well, I am one of them,” said Fanny, quite unabashed, turning a diamond ring round on her finger so that its flashing splendor lent emphasis to the assertion, “and I can assure you that it is a very good means. Pride is the matter with you,” she went on, remorselessly, “and I call it a very selfish thing—much worse than the mercenary spirit, which I presume you feel very virtuous in despising! You don’t deny that you are in love with Aimée; you dare not say that she is not worth a thousand times more than her fortune; and yet you are prepared to let her go, for the sake of the money you profess to hold in such scorn, and because the Joscelyns might call you a fortune-hunter.”