"O, Di! tell me how it was he offended you."
"Who told you that he offended me?"
"Your own manner, dear. You could never have been so cold and distant with him—having known him so long, and endured so many troubles in his company—if you had not been deeply offended by him."
"That is your idea, Charlotte; but, you see, I am very unlike you. I am fitful and capricious. I used to like Mr. Hawkehurst, and now I dislike him. As to offence, his whole life has offended me, just as my father's life has offended me, from first to last. I am not good and amiable and loving, like you; but I hate deceptions and lies; above all, the lies that some men traffic in day after day."
"Was Valentine's—was your father's life a very bad one?" Charlotte asked, trembling palpably, and looking up at Miss Paget's face with anxious eyes.
"Yes, it was a mean false life,—a life of trick and artifice. I do not know the details of the schemes by which my father and Valentine earned their daily bread—and my daily bread; but I know they inflicted loss upon other people. Whether the wrong done was always done deliberately and consciously upon Valentine's part, I cannot say. He may have been only a tool of my father's. I hope he was, for the most part an unconscious tool."
She said all this in a dreamy way, as if uttering her own thoughts, rather than seeking to enlighten Charlotte.
"I am sure he was an unconscious tool," cried that young lady, with an air of conviction; "it is not in his nature to do anything false or dishonourable."
"Indeed! you know him very well, it seems," said Diana.
Ah, what a tempest was raging in that proud passionate heart! what a strife between the powers of good and evil! Pitying love for Charlotte; tender compassion for her rival's childlike helplessness; and unutterable sense of her own loss.