“Ah,” said Lady Betty, for a light broke in upon her, and she thought of the tall old man walking in the gallery at Althorpe, “I never knew it,” she added quietly, “my whole family opposes any mention of—of my husband.”
She pronounced the word with a soft adorable hesitation, blushing rosily up to her very ears, and his eyes glowed as he looked at her. They turned a loop of the gravel walk and passed Melissa, who huddled against the hedge, courtesying low. Betty scarcely glanced at her.
“Then there is no one to plead my friend’s cause but your own heart, Lady Clancarty,” he said quietly, “your own heart and the tie that must plead for itself a little. I have no eloquence to match the occasion, willingly as I serve my benefactor.”
“I tell you plainly, sir,” she retorted, “that I will hear only one suit, and that is from him; nor will I, mark you, promise to hear that favorably. Love, sir, is not cold and a laggard and full of excuses. If I am worth having I am worth winning.”
“Madam, I am constrained to tell the truth,” he said in a tone of deep emotion; “I believe that Lord Clancarty would die to win you.”
“Die, sir,” she said archly, “rather live. Dead he could not win me.”
“Ay, and ’twould be the bitterness of death to lose you,” he said; “’tis so—even to think of it!”
The break in his words made her heart beat fast, but she was mistress of herself now.
“Especially after fourteen years of absence,” she mocked wickedly.
“Fourteen years in purgatory, madam,” he replied, his tone full of pathos, of powerful emotion under restraint; “and when the poor exile sees at last the gates of paradise!—ah, my lady, you will not close them in his face?”