There was no answer.
'Mary!'
She could scarcely have made any reply just then, as Cecil closed her sweet lips most effectually.
'Hew actually takes his position with me for granted,' said she, after a little pause, with her head reclined on Cecil's shoulder. 'He is absurd, and insolent as a wooer, yet seems to think there is no need for exerting himself to win a bride that is bestowed upon him. He treats me as if I were his property—a gift from Sir Piers in fact,' she continued with an angry little laugh.
'And you, with all your beauty and wealth too, Mary, are to become the sacrifice of an old man's ambition to endow his house, and a young man's avarice! Oh, my darling, it is monstrous! and in this age of the world, ridiculous too! But perhaps the good old general may come round in time, and see the folly of his scheme.'
She shook her head, and said brokenly:
'You speak of wealth—I would I were penniless, for your sake; it is as a millstone about my neck; I think papa's will was most iniquitous!'
Until Mary Montgomerie met and knew Cecil Falconer, she had lived like the lady of Shalott, in a world of dreams—a young girl's dreams of a lover; for even the advent of Hew as an admirer—an intended—had certainly not embodied the idea to her.
She had read in Byron that a woman's love was a woman's whole existence, and such she would have made it now to herself; and doubtless had Cecil chosen to exert the power he had over her heart, and lured her, as one less scrupulous might have done, into risking the esclandre, he would have persuaded her to defy Sir Piers and fly with him; but he never for a moment entertained the idea of a measure that would have been such injustice to herself, as it would have involved the loss of her fortune, and perhaps its eventual transference to Hew!
Snarley now suddenly showed his teeth, as if to announce the approach of the latter through the outer drawing-room, where it would almost seem that he had been again an unseen listener, as at Eaglescraig.