"Well, dearest, as you have given him the best part of you,—your heart,—it is as well the rest should follow," says Mrs. Herrick, tenderly. "Yes, I think you will be very happy with him."
This speech is so strange, so unexpected, so exactly unlike anything she had made up her mind to receive, that for a moment Olga is stricken dumb. Then with a rush she comes back to glad life.
"'Do I wake? do I dream? are there visions about?'" she says. "Why, what sentiments from you! You have 'changed all that,' apparently."
"I have," says Hermia, very slowly, yet with a vivid blush. Something in her whole manner awakes suspicion of the truth in Olga's mind.
"Why," she says, "you don't mean to tell me that——Oh, no! it can't be true! and yet——I verily believe you have——Is it so, Hermia?"
"It is," says Hermia, who has evidently, by help of some mental process of her own, understood all this amazing farrago of apparently meaningless words.
There is a new sweetness on Mrs. Herrick's lips. One of her rare smiles lights up all her calm, artistic face.
"After all your vaunted superiority!" says Olga, drawing a deep sigh. "Oh, dear!" Then, with a wicked but merry imitation of Mrs. Herrick's own manner to her, she goes on!—
"You are throwing yourself away, dearest. The world will think nothing of you for the future; and you, so formed to shine, and dazzle, and——"
"He will be a baronet at his father's death," says Mrs. Herrick, serenely, with a heavy emphasis on the first pronoun; and then suddenly, as though ashamed of this speech, she lets her mantle drop from her, and cries, with some tender passion,——