“You, Helen! I never could have thought you would have urged me so!”
“O Cecilia! if you knew the pain it was to me to make you unhappy again,—but I assure you it is for your own sake. Dearest Cecilia, let me tell you all that General Clarendon said about it, and then you will know my reasons.” She repeated as quickly as she could, all that had passed between her and the general, and when she came to this declaration that, if Cecilia had told him plainly the fact before, he would have married with perfect confidence, and, as he believed, with increased esteem and love: Cecilia started up from the sofa on which she had thrown herself, and exclaimed,
“O that I had but known this at the time, and I would have told him.”
“It is still time,” said Helen.
“Time now?—impossible. His look this morning. Oh! that look!”
“But what is one look, my dear Cecilia, compared with a whole life of confidence and happiness?”
“A life of happiness! never, never for me; in that way at least, never.”
“In that way and no other, Cecilia, believe me. I am certain you never could endure to go on concealing this, living with him you love so, yet deceiving him.”
“Deceiving! do not call it deceiving, it is only suppressing a fact that would give him pain; and when he can have no suspicion, why give him that pain? I am afraid of nothing now but this timidity of yours—this going back. Just before you came in, Clarendon was saying how much he admired your truth and candour, how much he is obliged to you for saving him from endless misery; he said so to me, that was what made me so completely happy. I saw that it was all right for you as well as me, that you had not sunk, that you had risen in his esteem.”
“But I must sink, Cecilia, in his esteem, and now it hangs upon a single point—upon my doing what I cannot do.” Then she repeated what the general had said about that perfect openness which he was sure there would be in this case between her and Beauclerc. “You see what the general expects that I should do.”