“No idea of what I mean?” he stammered. “Why—why—you were engaged to your cousin, Edward Walford, were you not?”
A new light suddenly flashed into Lucy’s mind. All along she had been convinced that there was some reason for George’s failure to visit her on the occasion of his previous arrival in port, and now the matter was assuredly on the eve of explanation. So she looked up into George’s face, and said quietly—
“No, George, I never was engaged to my cousin. He proposed to me, but I refused him, explicitly and in most unmistakable terms.”
“You did?” panted George, his heart throbbing tumultuously. “When was that?”
“On the evening of the day when you last arrived in Portsmouth harbour in the Industry.”
Then, all in a moment, a suspicion of the truth dawned upon George.
“And it was on that same evening that I met him out there, close to the church, and he confided to me, as a great secret, the circumstance that you had just accepted him.”
“You were so near as that, and yet you never called? For shame, George!” exclaimed Lucy.
“Well, you see—I—that is—in fact I could not. The—the plain truth is that I—I was on my way to you at the time, to try my own fortune with you, and when I was told that you had accepted your cousin, I—well, I felt that I couldn’t meet you just then,” stammered George with desperate energy.
“Poor George!” murmured Lucy. “How well my cousin understood your unsuspicious character! He knew it would never occur to you to doubt his word, and he told you that tale to keep you away from—from—”