"Offers you his hand in marriage."
For a moment the light, the mirrors, the roof itself swam round me, and I sank half-fainting in my mother's arms.
"O! this is but a jest, a cruel jest to frighten me. Say, mother, it is a jest!"
"It is not a jest; it is sober, serious earnest;" and she raised me sternly from her arms. "He has offered his hand, and you will marry him."
I flung myself on my knees at the bedside, clasped her hands, and as my night-dress fell back from my shoulders and bosom, I told her, with sobs and tears, of my love for Ernest, and my engagement with him.
"Pshaw! A poor clergyman's son," she said bitterly.
"O, let us leave this place, mother!" I cried, still pressing her hands to my bosom. "You say that we are poor. Be it so. We will find a home together in the home of my childhood. Or if that fails us, I will work for you. I will toil from sun to sun and all night long,—beg,—do anything rather than marry this man. For, mother, I cannot help it,—but I do hate him with all my soul."
"Pretty talk, very pretty!" and she loosened her hands from my grasp; "but did you ever try poverty, my child? Did you ever know what the word meant,—poverty? Did you ever work sixteen hours a day, at your needle, for as many pennies, walk the streets at dead of winter in half-naked feet, and go for two long days and nights without a morsel of food? Did you ever try it, my child? That's the life which poor widows and their pretty daughters live in New York, my dear."
"But Ernest loves me,—he will make his way in life,—we will be married,—you will share our home, dear mother."
These words rendered her perfectly furious. She started up and uttered a frightful oath—it was the first time I had ever heard an oath from a woman's lips. Her countenance for a moment was fiendish. She assailed me with a torrent of reproaches, concluding thus: