"Because, my poor girl, it is a life of concealment, in constant dread of discovery and the humiliation attending discovery. Change all that and your life will be happier. Trust in those who are nearest to you, and make yourself, your name, your errors, and your sufferings and repentance fully known. Emma Cavendish is the ruling power in this house, and she is a pure, noble, magnanimous spirit. She would protect you," pleaded the old man, taking her hand.
"Oh, yes, she is all that! Do you think that makes it any easier for me to shock her with the story of my own folly, weakness and cowardice? Oh, no, no! I could not bear the look of her clear, truthful blue eyes! And I would not! There; it is useless to talk to me, Doctor Jones! There are some things that I can not do. I can not stay here!"
"My poor, poor child, whither will you go? Stay! Now I think of it, I can send you to my house at Beresford Manors. That shall be your home, if you will accept it. But what excuse can you make for leaving this place so abruptly?"
"You are very kind, Doctor Jones. You are very kind. But a moment's reflection will teach you that I could not accept your hospitality. You have no lady, I believe, at Beresford Manors? No one there except the colored servants? Therefore, you see, it would not be proper for me to go there," said Mary Grey, affecting a prudery that she did not feel, and objecting to the place only because she did not choose to bury herself in a house more lonely, dreary and deserted, if possible, than Blue Cliff Hall itself.
"Then where can you go, my poor girl?" compassionately questioned the old minister.
"I have thought of that. Sudden as this emergency is, I am not quite unprepared for it. This crisis that I feared might come has come, that is all. Only it has come in a far different manner from what I feared. But the result must be the same. I must leave the house immediately. And you must help to smooth my way toward leaving it."
"But whither will you go, poor shorn lamb?"
"I have planned out all that, in view of this very contingency. I will go to Charlottesville, where I have a lady friend who keeps a boarding-house for the University students. I can stay with her, and make myself useful in return for board and lodging, until I get something to do for a living. That is all settled. I asked you for this interview only to satisfy myself that no hint of my identity had been dropped, and no suspicion of it excited, during my swoon; and, further, to beg you to keep my miserable secret hereafter, as you have hitherto."
"I have satisfied you, I hope, upon all those subjects."
"Yes; and I thank you."