"I did not come to see Mr. Granger. It was the hope of seeing you that brought me here. I am as great a fool as I was at Hale Castle, you see, Clarissa. There are some follies of which a man cannot cure himself."
"Mr. Fairfax!"
She looked up at him gravely, reproachfully, with as much anger as she could bring herself to feel against him; but as their eyes met, something in his—a look that told too plainly of passion and daring—made her eyelids fall, and she stood before him trembling like a frightened child. And this moment was perhaps the turning-point in Clarissa's life—the moment in which she took the first step on the wrong road that was to lead her so far away from the sacred paths of innocence and peace.
George Fairfax drew her hand through his arm—she had neither strength nor resolution to oppose him—and led her away to the quietest corner of the colonnade—a recess sheltered by orange-trees, and provided with a rustic bench.
There is no need to record every word that was spoken there; it was the old story of a man's selfish guilty love, and a woman's sinful weakness. He spoke, and Clarissa heard him, not willingly, but with faint efforts of resistance that ended in nothing. She heard him. Never again could she meet Daniel Granger's honest gaze as she had done—never, it seemed to her, could she lose the sense of her sin.
He told her how she had ruined his life. That was his chief reproach, and a reproach that a woman can rarely hear unmoved. He painted in the briefest words the picture of what he might have been, and what he was. If his life were wrecked utterly—and from his own account of himself it must needs be so,—the wreck was her fault. He had been ready to sacrifice everything for her. She had basely cheated him. His upbraiding stung her too keenly; she could keep her secret no longer.
"I had promised Laura Armstrong," she said—"I had promised her that no power on earth should tempt me to marry you—if you should ask me."
"You had promised!" he cried contemptuously. "Promised that shallow trickster! I might have known she had a hand in my misery. And you thought a promise to her more sacred than good faith to me? That was hard, Clarissa."
"It was hard," she answered, in a heart-broken voice.
"My God!" he cried, looking at her with those passionate eyes, "and yet you loved me all the time?"