“Stay,” interrupted Lady Isabel, “you need not trouble yourself to find needless excuses. Had you taken this journey for the purpose of making me your wife, were you to propose to do so this day, and bring a clergyman into the room to perform the ceremony, it would be futile. The injury to the child can never be repaired; and, for myself, I cannot imagine any fate in life worse than being compelled to pass it with you.”
“If you have taken this aversion to me, it cannot be helped,” he coldly said, inwardly congratulating himself, let us not doubt, at being spared the work of trouble he had anticipated. “You made commotion enough once about me making you reparation.”
She shook her head.
“All the reparation in your power to make—all the reparation that the whole world can invent could not undo my sin. It and the effects must lie upon me forever.”
“Oh—sin!” was the derisive exclamation. “You ladies should think of that beforehand.”
“Yes,” she sadly answered. “May heaven help all to do so who may be tempted as I was.”
“If you mean that as a reproach to me, it’s rather out of place,” chafed Sir Francis, whose fits of ill-temper were under no control, and who never, when in them, cared what he said to outrage the feelings of another. “The temptation to sin, as you call it, lay not in my persuasions half so much as in your jealous anger toward your husband.”
“Quite true,” was her reply.
“And I believe you were on the wrong scent, Isabel—if it will be any satisfaction to you to hear it. Since we are mutually on this complimentary discourse, it is of no consequence to smooth over facts.”
“I do not understand what you would imply,” she said, drawing her shawl round her with a fresh shiver. “How on the wrong scent?”