"But there you are wrong. There need be no dissensions; my mother and I are very good friends, and she expects us both to go to the Towers on Friday next."
Then he tells her all the truth about his interview with his mother, only suppressing such words as would be detrimental to the cause he has in hand, and might give her pain.
"And when she sees you all will be well," he says, still clinging bravely to his faith in this panacea for all evils. "Everything rests with you.'
"I will do my best," says Mona, earnestly; "but if I fail,—if after all my efforts your mother still refuses to love me, how will it be then?"
"As it is now; it need make no difference to us; and indeed I will not make the trial at all if you shrink from it, or if it makes you in the faintest degree unhappy."
"I do not shrink from it," replies she, bravely: "I would brave anything to be friends with your mother."
"Very well, then: we will make the attempt," says he, gayly. "'Nothing venture, nothing have.'"
"And 'A dumb priest loses his benefice,'" quotes Mona, in her turn, almost gayly too.
"Yet remember, darling, whatever comes of it," says Rodney, earnestly, "that you are more to me than all the world,—my mother included. So do not let defeat—if we should be defeated—cast you down. Never forget how I love you." In his heart he dreads for her the trial that awaits her.
"I do not," she says, sweetly. "I could not: it is my dearest remembrance; and somehow it has made me strong to conquer, Geoffrey,"—flushing, and raising herself to her full height, as though already arming for action,—"I feel, I know, I shall in the end succeed with your mother."