"Do be reasonable, my dear Lady Raymond," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, laughing. "I have always heard it considered hazardous for ladies to think of single men as their brothers: but I never heard that the same danger existed when they looked upon them as sons."
The prints fell from Margaret's hands. She sat listening—breathless—with parted lips, and eyes fixed, to every word that Mrs. Fitzpatrick uttered.
At first she could not think; she seemed turned to stone. Her next feeling was a sense of oppression, which made her find the crowded room intolerable. She looked cautiously round, and seeing every one engaged in their own pursuits, she made her escape through one of the open windows into the shrubbery.
And all this she might have known easily before. She must often have been within a hair's breadth of knowing, when any-thing moved Mrs. Fitzpatrick to some distant allusion to her daughter.
And two years had passed, during which she had been guilty of such injustice, such baseness; for had she loved nobly, would she have believed appearances against him? She, who was so slow to believe evil of the most casual acquaintance. All her sorrow, all her agony had been nothing to this corroding sense of shame to which she was now delivered.
When she had believed herself sinned against, she knew where to seek for alleviation; but how shield her heart from the intolerable sting of believing herself to be the one in fault? To have ruined her happiness for life through a narrowness of soul that refused to trust implicitly the heart and honour of the man she had chosen!
To her high generosity of feeling the anguish that these reflections brought with them was intolerable.
Sinking on a seat, she remained motionless—tearless; endeavouring to still by the pressure of her hands, the wild beating of her heart. And few people, after committing some deadly crime, would have felt more conscience-stricken, more self-debased, than Margaret, when she reproached herself for the ungenerous want of a romantic confidence.
How long she sat there she knew not; but she was roused by the clear voice of Harriet, among the shrubs exclaiming:
"Run, Everard! Why don't you run? How can you expect to find any one at this snail's pace?"