Their correspondence had been infrequent, and she knew little of him, save that he had been married twice, and that on the death of his second wife he had brought her his child to raise, and gone away abruptly, a broken-hearted, lonely man.
Yet, as she looked at him sitting there, so handsome still in his young, splendid prime, with threads of premature silver creeping into the thick locks on his temples, and remembered how heavily the shadows of grief had stretched across his life, the woman’s heart was moved to pity and tenderness, such as she had felt in his babyhood days, when he was the pet and darling of all. Her cold gray eyes softened with sympathy, as she cried:
“Surely, Everard, you have had more than your share of sorrow in life! What new trouble is this? For, of course, you would not oppose such a splendid match for your daughter without grave reasons.”
He lifted his heavy eyes to her troubled face, and answered, bitterly:
“Yes, I have reasons, grave and bitter reasons, for forbidding this marriage, and I thank Heaven I came in time to prevent it. But ask me nothing, Rebecca, for I shall never willingly divulge my reasons, not even to the man whom I must send away sorrowing to-morrow over a broken love-dream.”
His voice fell to exquisite pathos, as if he almost pitied the man he intended to wound so cruelly.
Mrs. Flint was disappointed, crest-fallen, she had been so elated over [her] niece’s prospects.
She rejoined, uneasily:
“I don’t know what Cinthy will say to this. Her heart is set on Arthur Varian. He stands for everything she longs for most, and her hatred of her life with me is intense and rebellious. You can never reconcile her to it again.”
“I must make a change in it, then, though my means are not large,” he sighed.