"And yet this is the man whom you have chosen to misrepresent in such a matter. Believe me, that people unfortunately situated as we are, could have found very few friends with the kind heart, the tact, and delicacy of Captain Lyster."
And then Barbara, heated and fatigued with her defence, stopped, and her head drooped again, and she was silent. There was an awkward pause; then Churchill said,
"You sent for me to--"
"As I have told you--to confess that I had heard the statement made in the next room, and to admit that I was in error in imagining that those letters came from an improper source."
Now was Frank Churchill's time. One kind word from him, and the misery of his life was at an end. But with that strange perversity which not unfrequently is a characteristic of good and clever men, he fell into the snare of saying and doing exactly what he should not.
"And you are prepared to come home--" he commenced, in a hard voice.
"Not if invited in that tone," broke in Barbara abruptly.
"To come home," continued Churchill, not noticing the interruption,--"to come home confessing that you were entirely in the wrong, and that you had no shadow of excuse for leaving as you did. To come home--"
"Stop, Frank!" burst out Barbara, unable any longer to control herself; "this is not the way to win a person of my temperament to agree to any measures which you may propose. To come home, confessing this and acknowledging that,--why, you know perfectly that you yourself were equally to blame in the preposterous jealousy which you showed of Captain Lyster! I will confess and acknowledge nothing. I will come home to you as your wife,--to be the first in your regard,--to devote myself to you; but I will make no pledges as to accepting other people's interference, or submitting to--"
"In fact," said Frank, "as to being any thing different from what you were. Now that will not do. Much as--as I may have loved you"--his voice broke here--"I would sooner live away from you than undergo the torture of those last few weeks at home again. It would be better for us both that--well, I will not say more about it. God's will be done! One thing, I shall be able to make you now some definite allowance, on which you can live comfortably without being a burden on your relatives or friends. Sir Marmaduke Wentworth is dead; and I understand from his lawyer that I am a legatee, though to what extent I do not yet know. I had hoped that--"