Annie drew back, but Laura’s arm, passed round her slender waist, detained her.
“You love Lewis Arundel?”
This time Annie did not reply, but a convulsive pressure of the hand answered Laura’s question better than words could have done.
“Then, if you love him as he deserves to be loved, how could you allow yourself to be forced into an engagement with Lord Bellefield?”
“Must I, indeed, reveal to you all my folly and weakness?” murmured poor Annie.
“Really I am afraid you must, dear, if you wish my advice to be of the smallest use to you,” returned Laura with a kind, encouraging smile; “but perhaps the follies may prove not to have been so very foolish, and the weaknesses turn out amiable ones after all. Come, let us hear!” Thus urged, Annie recounted with smiles, and tears, and words, now dropping in broken sentences, now poured forth with all the eager vehemence with which feelings long restrained at length find vent, that portion of this veritable history which especially related to herself, and the rise and progress of her unfortunate attachment; until she reached the point whereat, overwhelmed by the belief that Lewis had departed from Broadhurst, suspecting her love and not reciprocating it, she had permitted herself to be hurried into an engagement with Lord Bellefield, sacrificing herself to guard against the possibility of any imputation being cast upon her maidenly reserve. Here Laura interrupted her by exclaiming—
“My poor child! I see it all now; you are to be pitied, not blamed; would to Heaven you had known the truth earlier! how much misery it might have saved you. Lewis Arundel quitted Broadhurst because he loved you with all the impassioned tenderness of his fiery nature, and found even his iron will powerless to control or even longer to conceal his feelings.”
“How do you know this?” exclaimed Annie, sweeping back her luxuriant ringlets from her flushed cheeks, and fixing her large, eager eyes upon her friend’s countenance.
“From his own lips when he first heard that you were coming here,” was the reply. And Annie, pressing her hands to her eyes, hid her face in the sofa cushion and burst into tears; but this time they were tears of joy.
Then, when she had in some degree recovered from her agitation, Annie learned the history of Lewis’s wanderings to cure his love, and how signally the remedy had failed, and how he had turned painter, and was cleverer than anybody else (a fact of which she felt convinced before she heard it), and how Laura had discovered his secret through the medium of his sketch of Annie and Faust—(she did not mention the “Giaour” pictures, fearing to alarm her friend)—and how Charles and she had seen a great deal of him and become very fond of him (oh how Annie loved her for saying that!), and how at last one day she had gained his confidence and he had told her all, and how she had resolved never to breathe a syllable of it to Annie unless she could clear herself in the matter of accepting Lord Bellefield, and thus prove herself not unworthy to possess the knowledge that the priceless blessing of Lewis’s noble and generous heart was hers, and hers only. And when Laura had finished, Annie, like a true woman, contrived by a series of “cunning-simple” questions to make her tell her tale all over again, particularly those portions which related to Lewis’s nobleness of nature, and the depth, strength, and permanent quality of his affection for herself; and when all had been said and re-said that could by any possibility be found to say, even on this interesting matter, Annie fixed her soft, imploring eyes on her friend’s countenance, and asked in a tone of the most innocent but complete helplessness—