"Oh, I'm frightened at the very thought of returning to town; and yet, down here, there are--I mean--it's--how very silly of me!--you must excuse me, Colonel Alsager, I am anything but strong;" and poor Georgie's tears began to flow again.
"So I see," said Laurence, in a very gentle tone. She had seated herself in one corner of a low brown morocco-leather couch that stood across the window. Hitherto he had been standing, but he now placed himself at the other end of the sofa.
"I think," said he, bending forward, and speaking in the same low earnest voice,--"I think, dear Lady Mitford, that you will be disposed to give me credit for taking a deep and friendly interest in you."
She looked at him through the tears that still stood in her splendid eyes--a frank, trusting, honest glance; and as he hesitated, she said, "I know it--I have proved it."
"Then, though your sex is taught to believe that mine is thoroughly selfish and heartless,--never moving without some end for its own benefit in view,--you still believe that what I am about to say to you is dictated simply by the hope to serve you, the desire to see you happy?"
She bowed her head, but did not speak this time. Her tears were gone, but there was a painful look of anxiety in her eyes, and the spasmodic motion of the muscles of the mouth betrayed her agitation.
"You are very young," he continued, "and wholly unacquainted with the world. I am certainly past the freshness of youth, and I should think there are not many of my age more thoroughly versed in the world's ways. And one of its ways, dear Lady Mitford, one of its never-failing and most repulsive ways, is to rob life of the glamour with which youth invests it; to lift up a corner of the silken curtain of the fairy temple and show the rough bare boards and wooden trestles behind it; to throw stumbling-blocks in the paths of happiness, and to drag down those now falling to a lower depth; to poison truth's well, to blacken innocence, and to sow distrust and misery broadcast,--these are among the world's ways. To be pure, noble, and beloved, is at once to provoke the world's hatred. Is it any wonder then that some of its emissaries are plotting against you?"
A faint blush overspread her cheeks as she said, "I have done nothing to provoke them."
"Pardon me," said Laurence, "you have offended in the three ways I have just pointed out: there are few who offer such a combination of offences. And the world will have revenge for all. To besmirch your purity, to lower the nobleness of your nature, are tasks which as yet it dare not attempt. But to prevent your being beloved,--by those whose love you have a right to claim,--is apparently, not really, far more easily done."
"It is, indeed," cried poor Georgie, mournfully; "it is, indeed."