“Oh no,” said Selina, brushing the tears away with fingers that trembled all over. “I—if you please—I think I am going to live at the Torr.”
The old lady wondered whether Selina was dreaming. “At the Torr!” said she. “There are no children at the Torr. They don’t want a governess at the Torr.”
“I am going there to be with Mr. Radcliffe,” spoke Selina, in her throat, as if she meant to choke.
“To be with old Radcliffe! Why, the child’s gone cranky! Paul Radcliffe don’t need a governess.”
“He wants to marry me.”
“Mercy upon us!” cried the old lady, lifting both hands in her amazement. And Selina burst into tears again.
Yes, it was true. Paul Radcliffe, who was fifty years of age, if a day, and had a son over twenty, had been proposing marriage to that bright young girl! They had met in the fields often, it turned out, and Mr. Radcliffe had been making his hay while the sun shone. Every one went on at her.
“It would be better to go into a prison than into that gloomy Sandstone Torr—a young girl like you, Selina,” said Mrs. Todhetley. “It would be sheer madness.”
“Why, you’d never go and sacrifice yourself to that old man!” cried the Squire, who was just as outspoken and impulsive and good-hearted then as in these latter years. “He ought to be ashamed of himself. It would be like June and December.”
But all they said was of no use in the end. It was not that Selina, poor girl, was in love with Mr. Radcliffe—one could as well have fancied her in love with the grizzly old bear, just then exhibiting himself at Church Dykely in a travelling caravan. But it was her position. Without money, without a home, without a resource of any kind for the future, save that of teaching for her bread, the prospect of becoming mistress of Sandstone Torr was something fascinating.