"Why not continue? Because you—love him still."
"Well, and why not?" says Molly. "Why should I deny my love for him? Can any shame be connected with it? Yes," murmurs she, her sweet eyes filling with tears, her small clasped hands trembling, "though he and I can never be more to each other than we now are, I tell you I love him as I never have and never shall love again."
"It is a pity that such love as yours should have no better return," says he, with an unlovely laugh. "Luttrell appears to bear his fate with admirable equanimity."
"You are incapable of judging such a nature as his," returns she, disdainfully. "He is all that is gentle, and true, and noble: while you——" She stops abruptly, causing a pause that is more eloquent than words, and, with a distant bow, hurries from the room.
Philip's star to-day is not in the ascendant. Even as he stands crushed by Molly's bitter reproaches, Marcia, with her heart full of a settled revenge toward him, is waiting outside her grandfather's door for permission to enter.
That unlucky shadow of a kiss last night has done as much mischief as half a dozen real kisses. It has convinced Marcia of the truth of that which for weeks she has been vainly struggling to disbelieve, namely, Philip's mad infatuation for Molly.
Now all doubt is at an end, and in its place has fallen a despair more terrible than any uncertainty.
All the anguish of a heart rejected, that is still compelled to live on loving its rejector, has been hers for the past two months, and it has told upon her slowly but surely. She is strangely altered. Dark hollows lay beneath her eyes, that have grown almost unearthly in expression, so large are they, and so sombre is the fire that burns within them. There is a compression about the lips that has grown habitual; small lines mar the whiteness of her forehead, while among her raven tresses, did any one mark them closely enough, fine threads of silver may be traced.
Pacing up and down her room the night before, with widely-opened eyes, gazing upon the solemn blackness that surrounds her, all the wrongs and slights she has endured come to her with startling distinctness. No sense of weariness, no thought of a necessity for sleep, disturbs her reverie or breaks in upon the monotonous misery of her musings. She is past all that. Already her death has come to her,—a death to her hope, and joy, and peace,—even to that poor calm that goes so far to deceive the outer world.
Oh, the cold, quiet night, when speech is not and sleep has forgotten us! when all the doubts and fears and jealousies that in the blessed daylight slumber, rise up to torture us when even the half-suspected sneer, the covert neglect, that some hours ago were but as faintest pin-pricks, now gall and madden as a poisoned thrust!