‘Dear Lionne!’ she repeated to herself, ‘dear Lionne! he says to me, dear Lionne!’
What was that quick fear which seized me as I listened to her unconscious words? What that trembling which assailed my limbs, and rendered me incapable of moving either backwards or forwards? The fear and trembling fell so suddenly upon me, that I had hardly time to realise their presence, until they had resolved themselves into a knowledge, fearful as a thunderbolt from heaven, but certain as that I live—or I must die!
I love her—and she loves me! We have destroyed each other’s happiness.
As this conviction smote me, I dropped her cold fingers, and sinking down upon the hillock beside which she stood, buried my face in my hands.
Good heavens! how was it that I had never anticipated this—never seen it coming—never dreamt of such a contingency?—that I had spent day after day in her company; reading with her, singing with her, riding with her, listening to her amusing conversation, watching all her womanly kindness to my wife (ah, my poor wife!), contemplating her beauty from hour to hour, and never once suspected that I might grow to love her more than was good or right? And she, the girl whose advent I had dreaded, whose manners I had so disliked, whose beauty was to me no beauty at all!
Ah, Margaret, Margaret! you may have your revenge now if you will, in the assurance that never, never more shall the remembrance of that fatal beauty be purged from my existence.
All was now explained; her worn looks and dispirited appearance; my own restless and uneasy sensations; the guilty feeling had been growing in us, surely though unconsciously, for many long days past, and needed but some such accident as the present to warm it into life.
Have I not reason to wish that I were dead?
I did not sit upon the hillock long; something was waiting to be done, and that was not the time for thought. I could not even stay to watch her as she again commenced to pace beneath the moonlight, with the evening breeze playing with her flimsy raiment, and making it cling about her graceful figure. I felt that she must be coaxed to return into the house, and that I was neither the right person nor in a right state of mind to do it.