"Higher views!" she said; "poor dear old man! no, no, indeed."
"It is scarcely strange that I bore you with these questions. It is so hard to think that, meeting you with your affections disengaged, I have yet been utterly unable to win one shadow of regard upon which I might build a hope for the future."
Poor Talbot! Talbot, the splitter of metaphysical straws and chopper of logic, talking of building hopes on shadows, with a lover's delirious stupidity.
"It is so hard to resign every thought of your ever coming to alter your decision of to-night, Aurora,"—he lingered on her name for a moment, first because it was so sweet to say it, and secondly, in the hope that she would speak,—"it is so hard to remember the fabric of happiness I had dared to build, and to lay it down here to-night for ever."
Talbot quite forgot that, up to the time of the arrival of John Mellish, he had been perpetually arguing against his passion, and had declared to himself over and over again that he would be a consummate fool if he was ever beguiled into making Aurora his wife. He reversed the parable of the fox; for he had been inclined to make faces at the grapes while he fancied them within his reach, and now that they were removed from his grasp, he thought that such delicious fruit had never grown to tempt mankind.
"If—if," he said, "my fate had been happier, I know how proud my father, poor old Sir John, would have been of his eldest son's choice."
How ashamed he felt of the meanness of this speech! The artful sentence had been constructed in order to remind Aurora whom she was refusing. He was trying to bribe her with the baronetcy which was to be his in due time. But she made no answer to the pitiful appeal. Talbot was almost choked with mortification. "I see—I see," he said, "that it is hopeless. Good night, Miss Floyd."
She did not even turn to look at him as he left the balcony; but with her red drapery wrapped tightly round her, stood shivering in the moonlight, with the silent tears slowly stealing down her cheeks.
"Higher views!" she cried bitterly, repeating a phrase that Talbot used,—"higher views! God help him!"
"I must wish you good-night and good-bye at the same time," Captain Bulstrode said, as he shook hands with Lucy.