“But why do you come?” asked Mary demurely; “I’m sure this place is miserable enough. It’s a perfect purgatory.”
“For shame!” he said, with a quiet, happy smile; “why, its a perfect paradise, dear, and unless I’m very hard at work, I’m wretched unless I’m here.—Mary, dear?”
“Yes.”
“When is it to be?”
“What?”
“Our wedding.”
“How can you ask me such a thing? As if I could ever think of leaving poor Claude. And besides, after such a lesson upon what matrimony really is, I wonder that you should ever renew the subject.”
“No, you don’t, dear,” he said, gaining possession of the little white hand, which pretended to escape, and then resigned itself to its fate, while Trevithick’s countenance told how truthful were his words.
“Tell me when it shall be,” he said in a whisper.
“When I can see Claude happy.—John, couldn’t she have a divorce?”