“Lady, do you love your cousin?”
“Love him? Ah, God!”
“Dear lady, if he had returned from the frontier with the loss of an arm, a leg, or an eye—or with the hideous scar of a sword cut across cheek and brow, could you have turned from him revolted?”
“Oh, no, no, no! Oh! Heaven, no! I should have done all I could to convince him that he was beautiful to me still—that I loved him the deeper for his misfortunes!”
“Then, dear lady, judge his noble heart by your own.”
“Ah, but you said yourself, just now, when advising me not to write, that men feel so differently from women!”
“Yes, but not in tenderness—not in constancy!”
“There is the boy coming from the post-office, Catherine! It is strange—it is strange—but though I have been disappointed a hundred times, I still hope, and the coming of every mail makes my heart pause! Go, dear Catherine, and see what there is.”
Kate rolled up her knitting, and dropped it into a little straw basket, and went below.
“Only one letter, an’ the Pos’-Master say how it war for Miss Carolyn,” said the boy below stairs.