"What harm has she ever done me?"
"Made you what you are,—too good to be bad, and …"
"Too bad to be good? True; but that has not been her doing."
"Has it not?" he retorted, and fixed his eyes upon me, as if he would have read into my soul.
After a pause, he said, glancing at Alice, "Take care what you do with her. She lives in a dream; and if you show her but once life as it is—as it ought to have been for her,—she will wake, break her heart, if she has one, or that of someone else, if she has not."
I could hardly command myself sufficiently to speak; but, laying my head against the window pane, and without looking at him, I said in a low voice, "Surely, Henry, you try to make her happy—you must feel affection for her?"
"Enough to wish, with all my soul, that I had never set eyes on her, or on you.—Don't go—don't stir from where you are. Once for all, hear it—you must listen to whatever I may choose to say to you. Once you would not believe me, when I told you that, by your obstinacy, you would sacrifice the happiness of three persons. You have done it; for mine" (he said this with a bitter laugh) "and your own and hers hang upon a thread. If you think to brave me, do so; go away now, and never speak to me again; but then, by Heaven, the thread snaps; and you will believe me this time, I hope!"
I did not stir; and that mute ackowledgment of Henry's secret power, which my soul rebelled against, but dared not defy, humbled me more bitterly than anything I had yet gone through.
After a few minutes of this speaking silence,—for, alas! how much the compliance of that hour revealed,—he himself walked away, joined his sister and his wife; and, after a few moments' conversation, he took his leave, and Alice went home in our carriage.
It was settled before they went, that on the next day they should dine in Brook-street; and Mrs. Middleton told me afterwards that she had arranged with Henry to use her best endeavours to persuade Mr. Lovell to meet them. He had charged her not to say before Alice that there would be any difficulty in obtaining this, as she had not the slightest idea that their marriage had been disapproved of by his family.