"Love him!" cried Lucy, indignantly, sad reproach in her eye, as she turned it on Travice. "You have seen us together hundreds of times; did you ever detect anything in my manner to induce you to think I 'loved' him?"
"I loved you," murmured Travice, for he read that reproach aright, and the scales which had obscured his eyes fell from them, as by magic. "I have long loved you—deeply, passionately. My brightest hopes were fixed on you; the heyday visions of all my future existence represented you by my side, my wife. But these misfortunes and losses came thick and fast upon my father. They told me at home here, he told me, that I was poor and that you were poor, and that it would be madness in us to think of marrying then, as it would have been. So I said to myself that I would be patient, and wait—would be content with loving you in secret, as I had done—with seeing you daily as a relative. And then the news burst upon me that you were to marry Tom Palmer; and I thought what a fool I had been to fancy you cared for me; for I knew that you were not one to marry where you did not love."
The tears were coursing down her cheeks. "But I don't understand," she said. "It is but just, as it were, that Tom has asked me; and you must be speaking of sometime ago."
The fault was Mildred's. Not quite all at once could they understand it; not until later.
"I shall never marry; indeed I shall never marry," murmured Lucy, as she yielded for the moment to the passionate embrace in which Travice clasped her, and kissed away her tears of anguish. "My lot in life must be like my aunt's now, unloving and unloved."
"Oh, is there no escape for us!" exclaimed Travice, wildly, as all the painful embarrassment of his position rushed over his mind. "Can we not fly together, Lucy—fly to some remote desert place, and leave care and sorrow behind us? Ere the lapse of many days, another woman expects to be my wife! Is there no way of escape for us?"
None; none. The misery of Travice Arkell and his cousin was sealed: their prospects, so far as this world went, were blighted. There were no means by which he could escape the marriage that was rushing on to him with the speed of wings: no means known in the code of honour. And for Lucy, what was left but to live on unwedded, burying her crushed affections within herself, as her aunt had done?—live on, and, by the help of time, strive to subdue that love which was burning in her heart for the husband of another, rendering every moment of the years that would pass, one continued, silent agony!
"The same fate—the same fate!" moaned Mildred Arkell to herself, whilst Lucy sunk into a chair and covered her pale face with her trembling hands. "I might have guessed it! Like aunt, like niece. She must go through life as I have done—and bear—and bear! Strange, that the younger brother's family, throughout two generations, should have cast their shadow for evil upon that of the elder! A blight must have fallen upon my father's race; but, perhaps in mercy, Lucy is the last of it. If I could have foreseen this, years ago, the same atmosphere in which lived Travice Arkell should not have been breathed by Lucy. The same fate! the same fate!"
Lucy was sobbing silently behind her hands. Travice stood, the image of despair. Mildred turned to him.
"Then you do not love Miss Fauntleroy?"