"No."
Violet sighed deeply, and was silent. She tried to persuade herself that she ought not to be affected by the dark and bitter thoughts arising from the discovery of her lover's prior attachment; but instinctively she returned to the subject, to dwell on it with morbid satisfaction.
She passed a wretched night. Broken dreams of Marmaduke at her mother's feet, suddenly changing to dreams of her own marriage, interrupted at the foot of the altar, made her sleep restless. Her waking thoughts were scarcely less irritating. Sometimes she would try to believe that Mrs. Henley might have been misinformed, sometimes that the Mr. Ashley of whom she spoke might have been another Mr. Ashley, and sometimes that it was a mere flirtation which gossip had magnified, into an engagement. But these thoughts were chased away by the recollection of various looks interchanged with Marmaduke, when her mother was mentioned, looks which plainly told her that he had discovered the falsehood which was under the little creature's affected sensibility and goodness.
CHAPTER III.
DECLARATION.
Marmaduke persevered for several days in his system of polite indifference towards Mrs. Meredith Vyner, while his attentions to Violet became more and more explicit. Her suspicions were gradually giving way.
One evening they sat in the drawing-room discussing Norma, which they had seen the night before; and passing from the singers to the story, Violet remarked what a grand tragic idea it contained.
"Yet I scarcely think," said Mrs. Vyner, "that the story is taken up at its best point. Suppose the author had shown us the early struggles of Norma—her passion gradually consuming religious scruples—would not that have been fine? Then, again, after she loves Pollio, her struggles to conceal from others the crime she has been guilty of; surely there is nothing more fearful than the combat in a woman's breast, when she is hourly striving first to resist a passion, and then to conceal it because she knows its guilt!"
Her eyes were bent upon Marmaduke as she said this, and Violet noticed their strange expression.
"You will accuse me of libelling your sex," said he, laughing, "if I answer as I think."