"About poor Dennie. Has it ever occurred to you, Ned, that you may be doing him a great injury by sending Adela off in this way, and throwing her with Sylv?"
"No, of course not," answered Lance, somewhat nettled. "Would I have been a party to it if I had thought so?" But the mention of Sylv in this sort of way caused him an inward shudder. If there were any peril of Dennie's losing Adela, why should it be Sylv who should win her?
"I think you are helping to separate them," Jessie continued, "and you ought to reflect, and stop. Besides, why should you go on so, mixing yourself up in her affairs?"
"I'm not. I ought at least to see her and tell her my discovery."
Jessie suddenly rose. "I hate that woman!" she cried, sharply. And, at the same instant, Lance saw his engagement ring flashing upon her finger.
"You shall not hate her," he declared, with passion. "She is your kinswoman—one of us. It isn't right that you should say that, and I won't endure it."
"Never mind whether you will endure it or not," Jessie retorted. "She has occupied enough of your attention already."
"My dear child," Lance remonstrated, "it's impossible that you should be jealous of that girl! But what else can you mean? What do you demand?"
"I think that you ought to just drop her, from this time on," said Jessie, closing her lips decisively.
There are scientific thinkers who tell us that the will is not a cause, but merely a state of consciousness resulting from previous conditions of the nerves and the emotions. However this may be, Lance's will asserted itself in strong opposition to Jessie's. The probability that Adela was a lineal descendant of Gertrude Wylde appealed strongly to his imagination. Now that his theory seemed so well established, he was resolved to have her kinship acknowledged; and, further, he experienced a strong attraction toward her, the stress of which he did not fully comprehend. He himself represented the man who had loved Gertrude, who had vainly searched for and lost her. Was it not fair that he should have some hand in the destiny of the girl thus reclaimed, after the lapse of centuries, from the oblivion which had overtaken Gertrude's life?