“How horrid you are, Mr. Webster! At all events I mean to get quit of him. I am weary of a tie which is no tie; of a bond which galls me, and I would do anything, even something desperate, to break it.”
She started to her feet, and began walking up and down the room as she spoke, swaying her tall, fine figure with a restless movement as she did so. She was looking very handsome, her excitement had flushed her face and brightened her bright eyes, and involuntarily Webster admired her.
“There!” she said, presently, “now I have told you my news, so please rouse your sharp legal brains to help me. I don’t mind about the three hundred a year now, or the ultimate reversion of some bigger sum. I want to be free. I don’t want John Temple to cut his own throat or mine—and upon my word he looked as if he could do it—but I want to scrape out of my marriage some other way.”
“Well, let me have time to think it over.”
“Thanks, and now let us drop a disagreeable subject, and tell me what you have been doing with yourself all this long time? You look thinner, and you say you have been worried?”
“Yes; we all have worries and troubles, you know, Miss Weir.”
“That is true; but still I think life might be bright, might be sweet and worth living for.”
“I am sure yours is.”
“Oh! don’t pay me those commonplace compliments; I don’t want to hear them from you.”