When he heard those passionate words from Cora’s lips, when he saw the burning tears in her dark eyes, he felt ashamed and remorseful that he had let his heart wander from her and fixed it on another.
“Poor girl, she loves me well, and dare I risk the breaking of my troth to her? She might be driven to suicide, and her death would lie at my door,” he thought, in painful indecision that she clearly read with her keen, feminine intuition.
She drooped sorrowfully before him, her hands clasped in a mute abandon of despair, as she continued pathetically:
“If, indeed, you think I am hurrying up the wedding too much, I can postpone it again, though it would indeed be evil-omened, a third postponement. But I wish above all things to please you, my dearest. So tell me what you wish. Shall it be two weeks hence, or a month?”
Frank felt like a contemptible wretch and villain, but he also knew she was weaving a web for him from which he could not escape, in honor.
“Don’t fret any more, Cora! You need not postpone it a day longer than you choose. I’m ready any time you are!”
“Then it shall be next week, as I had planned it, dearest. Must you go so soon?” as he rose. “Good night”—lifting her face for his careless kiss.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
STARTLING NEWS.
Jessie Lyndon had been strong enough to send her lover from her because he was bound to another, but she was not brave enough to meet him daily in the intimate association of her mother’s home as she knew must be the case if she went to Mrs. Dalrymple’s before the wedding.
She must see him there daily with Cora, and she knew that her presence would only make him more unhappy, and hinder the return of his heart to the girl to whom it was plighted.