“Oh! I’m not so blind but what I could see that with half an eye—ay, and saw how it was with them before you did, Moriarty. From the first minute they comed into the room together, said I to myself, ‘there’s a pair of angels well matched, if ever there was a pair on earth.’ These things is all laid out above, unknownst to us, from the first minute we are born, who we are to have in marriage,” added Sheelah.
“No; not fixed from the first minute we are born, Sheelah: it is not,” said Moriarty.
“And how should you know, Moriarty,” said Sheelah, “whether or not?”
“And why not as well as you, Sheelah, dear,” replied Moriarty, “if you go to that?”
“Well, in the name of fortune, have it your own way,” said Sheelah; “and how do you think it is then?”
“Why it is partly fixed for us,” said Moriarty; “but the choice is still in us, always—”
“Oh! burn me if I understand that,” said Sheelah.
“Then you are mighty hard of understanding this morning, Sheelah. See, now, with regard to Master Harry and Peggy Sheridan: it’s my opinion, ‘twas laid out from the first, that in case he did not do that wrong about Peggy—then see, Heaven had this lady, this angel, from that time forward in view for him, by way of compensation for not doing the wrong he might have chose to do. Now, don’t you think, Sheelah, that’s the way it was?—be a rasonable woman.”
The rasonable woman was puzzled and silent, Sheelah and Moriarty having got, without knowing it, to the dark depths of metaphysics. There was some danger of their knocking their heads against each other there, as wiser heads have done on similar occasions.
It was an auspicious circumstance for Ormond’s love that Florence had now a daily object of thought and feeling in common with him. Mrs. M’Crule’s having piqued Florence was in Ormond’s favour: it awakened her pride, and conquered her timidity; she ventured to trust her own motives. To be sure, the interest she felt for this child was uncommonly vivid; but she might safely avow this interest—it was in the cause of one who was innocent, and who had been oppressed.