"I write this to you at once, almost directly after he proposed to me, and I have accepted him. Does it seem harsh and coarse in me to announce this to you so immediately? Believe me, the announcement is made from far different motives. I could not bear to be deceiving you. You will sneer at this, and say I have been deceiving you all along. I swear I have not. You will think that the very silence for which you reproached me in the letter just received has been owing to my dislike to tell you of the change in affairs. I swear it has not. I had no idea until this morning that Mr. Creswell liked me in any especial way; certainly none that he would ever ask me to become his wife.
"When he asked me, I had not had your letter. If I had, it would have made no difference in the answer I made to Mr. Creswell, but it deepens the pain with which I now write to you, showing me as it does, to an extent which I did not before quite realise, the store which you set by what is now lost to us for ever. I do not say this in excuse of myself or my deeds; I have no excuse to make. I have tried, and tried hard, to live in the position of life in which I have been placed. I have struggled with poverty, and tried to face the future--which would have been worse than poverty, penury, misery, want perhaps--with calmness. I have failed. I cannot help it, it is my nature to love money and all that money brings, to love comforts and luxuries, to shrink from privation. Had I gone straight from my father's deathbed to your house as your wife, I might perhaps have battled on; but we came here, and--I cannot go back. You will be far happier without me when your first shock is over. I should have been an impossible wife for a poor man, I know I should--complaining, peevish, irritable; ever repining at my poverty, ever envying the wealth of others. You are better without me, Walter, you are indeed! Our ways of life will be very different, and we shall never come across each other in any probability. If we should, I hope we shall meet as friends. I am sure it will not be very long before you recognise the wisdom of the course I am now taking, and are grateful to me for having taken it. You are full of talent, which you will now doubtless turn to good account, and of worthy aspirations, which you will find some one to sympathise with, and share the upward career which I am sure is before you. I thought I could have done as much at one time, but I know now that I could not, and I should be only acting basely and wickedly towards you, though you will not think it more basely and wickedly than I am now acting with you, if I had gone on pretending that I could, and had burdened you for life with a soured and discontented woman. I have no more to say.
"MARIAN."
"You do not repent of what you said to me this morning, Marian?" said Mr. Creswell in a whisper, as he took her in to dinner.
"On the contrary," she replied in the same tone, "I am too happy to have been able to gratify you by saying it."
"What has happened with Miss A.?" whispered Gertrude to Maude, at the same time; "I don't like the look in her eyes."
And certainly they did look triumphant, almost insolently so, when their glance fell on the girls.
[CHAPTER XX.]
DURING THE INTERVAL.
Saturday morning, the day after that on which Joyce had sent off the eventful letter to Marian. Twelve o'clock, and no appearance as yet of Lady Caroline Mansergh, who had sent word that she had a slight headache, and would take her breakfast in her room. Lady Hetherington hated people having breakfast in their rooms: it did not, of course, inconvenience her in the least; she herself was never particularly lively in the morning, and spoke very little, and disliked being spoken to, so that it was not the loss of companionship that she regretted; it was merely what people called a "fad" of hers, that the household generally should assemble at the breakfast-table, and she was annoyed when anything occurred to prevent it.