"He could not help it. I told him he would come, and he came."
"This, possibly, you call love; do you not?"
Emilia was about to utter a plain affirmative, but it was checked. The novelty of the idea of its not being love arrested her imagination.
"If he comes to you here," resumed Georgiana—
"He must come!" cried Emilia.
"My brother has sanctioned it, so his coming or not will rest with him. If he comes, let me know the good that you think will result from an interview? Ah! you have not weighed that question. Do so;—or you give no heed to it? In any ease, try to look into your own breast. You were not born to live unworthily. You can be, or will be, if you follow your better star, self-denying and noble. Do you not love your country? Judge of this love by that. Your love, if you have this power over him, is merely a madness to him; and his—what has it done for you? If he comes, and this begins again, there will be a similar if not the same destiny for you."
Emilia panted in her reply. "No; it will not begin again." She threw out both arms, shaking her head. "It cannot, I know. What am I now? It is what I was that he loves. He will not know what I am till he sees me. And I know that I have done things that he cannot forgive. You have forgiven it, and Merthyr, because he is my friend; but I am sure Wilfrid will not. He might pardon the poor 'me,' but not his Emilia! I shall have to tell him what I did; so" (and she came closer to Georgiana) "there is some pain for me in seeing him."
Georgiana was not proof against this simplicity of speech, backed by a little dying dimple, which seemed a continuation of the plain sadness of Emilia's tone.
She said, "My poor child!" almost fondly, and then Emilia looked in her face, murmuring, "You sometimes doubt me."
"Not your truth, but the accuracy of your perceptions and your knowledge of your real designs. You are certainly deceiving yourself at this instant. In the first place, the relation of that madness—no, poor child, not wickedness—but if you tell it to him, it is a wilful and unnecessary self-abasement. If he is to be your husband, unburden your heart at once. Otherwise, why? why? You are but working up a scene, provoking needless excesses: you are storing misery in retrospect, or wretchedness to be endured. Had you the habit of prayer! By degrees it will give you the thirst for purity, and that makes you a fountain of prayer, in whom these blind deceits cannot hide."