"Your duty! To my thinking, as he has not behaved at all well, you are not bound to go back to him. Has he behaved well? I ask you plainly."
Margaret did not answer the question.
"Nothing can absolve me from doing what I feel to be right."
She spoke very quietly, and Mr. Sandford said no more at the time, but he constantly renewed the subject, and Margaret was weary of repeating her own views of her position.
It was hard enough to find him so bent upon her staying, it was harder still to parry the urgent attacks made by her sister.
"If you go I shall die," Grace said one day, after a long and weary argument, in which poor Margaret had tried to show her a higher sense of duty.
"Why do you try me so?" Margaret said at length. "Can you never see things seriously? Oh, Grace, can you conceive it possible for me to take a solemn vow and make light of it afterwards?"
"But you cannot pretend that you love that man, Margaret?"
"Therein lies my sin—and my punishment," the young wife answered with a quivering lip. "We cannot command our affections—that I know, but we can check them, and we can at any rate try and not fail in other things."
Grace did not like the grave tone she spoke in; she had rallied from the fatigue of her journey, and amused her sister often by her endeavours to win a smile from Mr. Sandford. She was as usual reckless in her speech, and the only difference Margaret could see was that she did not try to provoke him; on the contrary, in all her sallies now, there was a certain subtle implied deference to his wishes, new and rather winning.