"Will you? Always? Is that true? Oh! Barbara, if I could only believe you mean those words, I could find courage to ask you—to say to you——"
"What do you want to say to me?" Her voice sank to a whisper; then, seized with a sudden rush of love, of pity, of self-abnegation, she added, "Nay, I will tell you! You have come to ask of me what Lord Bosworth must once have come to ask of Madame Sampiero, and, like her, I will say, yes,—" she covered her face with her hands.
And then she listened, very quietly, while Berwick told her, with broken words of passionate gratitude and endearment, of the plan which he had scarcely dared to believe he would have courage to propose. She knew he had a house, an old hunting lodge built by Louis XIII., on the edge of the Forest of St. Germains. It was a curious solitary pavilion, bought by his father as a very young man, and dear to Berwick and his sister as having been the scene,—the speaker's accents became more deeply tender,—of their parents' honeymoon. Within a drive of this enchanting spot was the little town of Poissy, where the mail train could be made to stop and where, the day after to-morrow, he would be waiting—
Barbara sat listening. She had raised her head and was staring straight before her. Berwick looked at her with entreating eyes—"It is close to Paris! Besides, they know you will be moving about."
"It is not that," she spoke with difficulty, hardly knowing why she felt so torn by conflicting feelings of shame and pain. Perhaps it was only because the evocation of St. Germains brought the presence of her mother before her.
She tried to tell herself that she had known that this would—nay, must—happen. The battle had been fought and lost before to-night. During the long solitary days Barbara had just lived through, she had acknowledged that she could not give up Berwick,—rather than that they must inevitably come to do what Lord Bosworth and Madame Sampiero had done. And yet this discussion, the unfolding of this plan, filled her with humiliation and misery. "When I come back," she said, looking at him, for the first time straight in the eyes, "I shall have to tell my god-mother—and—and Doctor McKirdy the truth."
"You will do what you wish. We shall both do exactly what you think right, my dearest!" Berwick could hardly believe in his own amazing good fortune, and yet he also felt ill at ease. "Barbara," he said suddenly, "before I go—and I ought to be going now, for I shall cross to France to-morrow—I want to tell you something——"
"Something else?" there was a tone of appeal in her voice.
"Yes, it will not take long. Perhaps I ought to have begun by doing so. Some time ago Oliver Boringdon made me a curious confidence. He told me that, were you ever free to marry, he meant to make you an offer, and if you refused,—he was good enough to intimate that he thought this quite possible,—to go on doing so at intervals unless you became the wife of another man!"
Barbara looked at him, and then began to laugh helplessly, though the words had jarred on her horribly. "Oliver Boringdon? You can't have understood; how dared he say such a thing—about me?" and the tears ran down her cheeks.