“Your daughter has conceived a strange passion for me,” he said in a low voice. “It is this which has caused her illness, and which she says will cause her death, if I cannot return it.”
“And you?” asked his listener after a moment’s silence.
“I? Why, I have never thought of your daughter in any such manner,” the young man replied. “I have never dreamed of loving her, or winning her love.”
“Then do not marry her,” Preston Cheney said quietly. “Marriage without love is unholy. Even to save life it is unpardonable.”
The rector was silent, and walked the room with nervous steps. “I must go home and think it all out,” he said after a time. “Perhaps Miss Cheney will find her grief less, now that she has imparted it to me. I am alarmed at her condition, and I shall hope for an early report from you regarding her.”
The report was made twelve hours later. Miss Cheney was delirious, and calling constantly for the rector. Her physician feared the worst.
The rector came, and his presence at once soothed the girl’s delirium.
“History repeats itself,” said Preston Cheney meditatively to himself. “Alice is drawing this man into the net by her alarming physical condition, as Mabel riveted the chains about me when her mother died.
“But Alice really loves the rector, I think, and she is capable of a much stronger passion than her mother ever felt; and the rector loves no other woman at least, and so this marriage, if it takes place, will not be so wholly wicked and unholy as mine was.”
The marriage did take place three months later. Alice Cheney was not the wife whom Mrs Stuart would have chosen for her son, yet she urged him to this step, glad to place a barrier for all time between him and Joy Irving, whose possible return at any day she constantly feared, and whose power over her son’s heart she knew was undiminished.