“It is for me to break my word,” answered the young girl proudly. “No power on earth shall make me marry you, now.”
Her lips were tightly pressed to her teeth as she spoke and she held her head high, though her eyes rested lovingly on his face.
“Why will you not marry me, Mamie?” George asked. He knew now that he had never loved her.
“I have had shame already,” she answered. “Shame in being thrust upon you, shame in having thrust myself upon you—though not for your money. You never knew. You asked me once how I knew your moods, and when you wanted me and when you would choose to be alone. Ask her, ask my mother. She is wiser than I. She could tell from your face, long before I could, what you wished—and we had signals and signs and passwords, she and I, so that she could help me with her advice, and teach me how to make myself wanted by the man I loved. Am I not contemptible? And when I told you that I loved you—and then made you believe that I was only acting, because there was no response—shame? I have lived with it, fed on it, dreamed of it, and to-day is the crown of all—my crown of shame. Marry you? I would rather die!”
“Whatever others may have done, you have always been brave and true, Mamie,” said George. “It may be better that we should not marry, but there has been no shame for you in this matter.”
“I am not so sure,” said Tom Craik with a chuckle and an ugly smile. “She is cleverer than she looks——”
George turned upon the old man with the utmost violence.
“Sir!” he cried savagely. “If you say that again I will break your miserable old bones, if I hang for it!”
“Like that fellow,” muttered Craik with a more pleasant expression than he had yet worn. “Like him more and more.”
“I do not want to be liked by you, and you know why,” George answered, for he had caught the words.