"No, that it should fall at all."
"Well, I do not believe in omens, and 'tis in the arms of another that you fall, at any rate. He gets the substance, I the shadow, the illusion--and even that is broken!"
"And so even the shadow is lost," said Elizabeth.
"Not yet. Open my heart, you will find it there," he answered quickly. "But how like you the portrait was!"
"Yes, I am said to look like my mother," she answered, striving, as we all do in tragic moments, to reach the height of the commonplace. "In the dress I now wear, under the changing fashions, the likeness is not so striking; but when I am gowned as she was, in the identical costume, which is still in existence, by the way, and sit as she did, in the dim light in that old chair, the resemblance is even more striking."
"Would that I might see you thus--in that dress of the olden time! Nothing except your actual presence in the hall has ever startled me so much as that image of the past did last night. You are so like the picture, but more beautiful, I think."
"Ah, yes, youth and the present are always the more beautiful. The admiral says I am not to be mentioned beside her--he loved her, I think--she was his cousin; they tell me she married very young, unhappily, too, and died when I was born, many years after. My father, too, died; I can scarcely remember him at all; I am alone."
"There should be a warning in this, should there not?" he asked softly; an idle question, fate had determined.
"I suppose so," replied the girl, wearily; "but what was I to do? The arrangement was made when I was a child. I have grown up with Edward Coventry, he loves me, he is a noble fellow, I respect--esteem him highly. It is a long-cherished wish of the admiral's; it was my mother's wish as well. I put him off, in spite of the engagement, for a year--for six months again," she said, with a glance the fond reproach of which cut him to the heart. "I promised him, on my word of honor, if he would only wait that time I would make no further objections. I cannot break that word now."
"Not even for me?"