"Indeed, miss, I may have been silly; but how was I to suspect he was not telling me the truth? I loved him too much for that! I told him I would not marry him without he had his father's leave. And he pretended he had got it, and read me such a beautiful letter from his mother! Oh, miss, it breaks my heart to think of it!"
A new fear came upon Hester: had he deceived the poor girl with a pretended marriage? Was he bad through and through? What her father would say to a marriage, was hard to think; what he would say to a deception, she knew! That he would like such a marriage, she could ill imagine; but might not the sense of escape from an alternative reconcile him to it?
Such thoughts passed swiftly through her mind as she stood half turned from Amy, looking down the deep stair that sank like a precipice before her. She heard nothing, but Amy started and turned to the door. She was following her, when Amy said, in a voice almost of terror,
"Please, miss, do not let him see you till I have told him you are here."
"Certainly not," answered Hester, and drew back,—"if you think the sight of me would hurt him!"
"Thank you, miss; I am sure it would," whispered Amy. "He is frightened of you."
"Frightened of me!" said Hester to herself, repeating Amy's phrase, when she had gone in, leaving her at the head of the stair. "I should have thought he only disliked me! I wonder if he would have loved me a little, if he had not been afraid of me! Perhaps I could have made him if I had tried. It is easier then to wake fear than love!"
It may be very well for a nature like Corney's to fear a father: fear does come in for some good where love is wanting: but I doubt if fear of a sister can be of any good.
"If he couldn't love me," thought Hester, "it would have been better he hadn't been afraid of me. Now comes the time when it renders me unable to help him!"
When first it began to dawn upon Hester that there was in her a certain hardness of character distinct in its nature from that unbending devotion to the right which is imperative—belonging in truth to the region of her weakness—that self which fears for itself, and is of death, not of life. But she was one of those who, when they discover a thing in them that is wrong, take refuge in the immediate endeavour to set it right—with the conviction that God is on their side to help them: for wherein, if not therein, is he God our Saviour?