“You have not won me!” she cried with a frightened start, but the triumphant lover, sure of his prize, replied:
“I do not think you will deny that your heart is mine, Louise, although I no more tried to win your love than you did mine. But this being so, the fact remains we were mutually strongly attracted to each other, so we must charge our union to the score of fate.”
“A strange fate!” Molly muttered, but her lover, who saw nothing but perfection now, where a short while ago he found so much fault, answered fondly:
“A very beneficent fate. Only think, we shall not only make ourselves happy by our marriage, but we shall please our families, who have been neighbors and intimates almost a century.”
“I have not said I would marry you, Mr. Laurens!” she cried out, quickly, more and more frightened, but he only smiled at what seemed to him maidenly bashfulness.
“Marriage naturally follows love like ours, dear,” he said, tenderly. “And, Louise, darling, I shall make you a very good husband. You will not find me such a bear as I have been these past weeks, when your coldness hurt my unconscious love and stung me to anger. You will be different, too, my pet, for our love will change our thoughts and our lives.”
“Yes,” she murmured, faintly, for she knew far better than he the extent of that change, but just now she did not contradict him again.
“What is the use? He will not listen,” she thought, feverishly. “I will let him love me while he is here and when he is gone I will write him very positively that I can not marry him.”
Her love and his happy masterful air made a coward of her, and she was willing to put off the fatal declaration, feeling a guilty pleasure in basking in this sunshine to which she had no right, and from which she must soon steal away into the gloom of a life made sad by an unhappy love.
For deep down in her heart Molly Trueheart knew already that this mutual love between her and Cecil Laurens was a catastrophe, not a blessing, as he believed it. She knew that she could never marry him, but her feeble declarations to that effect had been silenced by his objections, so she decided to filch from fate a few bitter-sweet hours before she parted forever from this splendid yet forbidden love.