They sat silent for a while after this, till at last he said—
‘Magdalen!’
‘Well?’
‘You are not a good young woman, you know. You have not always stuck to people as you promised you would. They say—every one says—that you jilted Michael Langstroth,—did not keep your promises to him, you know.’
‘They say what is quite true; and Michael Langstroth may thank me if I did jilt him. He was not made for me, nor I for him. I daresay he knows it by now.’
‘He took his dismissal,’ pursued Otho, with a sneer, ‘and never raised his hand. But let me advise you not to try that game with me, or there might be murder done, or something as bad. I’m not Michael Langstroth. Do you understand?’
He spoke in a fierce whisper, and in Magdalen’s laugh, as she answered him, there was a hysterical sound.
‘Do you suppose I don’t know that! For every one of Michael Langstroth’s good qualities, you have half a dozen bad ones. If you wasted your whole life in trying, you could never get as much goodness into your whole body as he has in his little finger; and oh, how tired I was of it—how tired I was, before it was all over.’
‘H’m! Well, I can promise that you shall never tire of my oppressive goodness and piety—that’s all.’
‘I know you are a complete pagan; sometimes I think I am too. There’s one thing, Otho—you must not ask me to marry you yet; my aunt would faint at the idea that I was engaged to you, and I am not going to tell her, and leave her, and break her heart. Do you understand?’