“Mr. Yorke, I do not know what you can have to speak about,” she answered, with dignity. “My distress is great, but I can hear what you wish to say.”
“I heard—I heard”—he spoke with emotion, and went plunging abruptly into his subject—“I heard this morning that Lord Carrick was soliciting you to become his wife.”
Constance could have laughed, but for her own distress, agitated though he was. “Well, sir?” she coldly said, in a little spirit of mischief.
“Constance, you cannot do it,” he passionately retorted. “You cannot so perjure yourself!”
“Mr. Yorke! Have you the right to tell me I shall or shall not marry Lord Carrick?”
“You can’t do it, Constance!” he repeated, laying his hand upon her shoulder, and speaking hoarsely. “You know that your whole affection was given to me! It is mine still; I feel that it is. You have not transferred it to another in this short time. You do not love and forget so lightly.”
“Is this all you have to say to me?”
“No, it is not all,” he answered, with emotion. “I want you to be my wife, Constance, not his. I want you to forget this miserable estrangement that has come between us, and come home to me at Hazledon.”
“Listen, Mr. Yorke,” she said; but it was with the utmost difficulty she retained her indifferent manner, and kept back her tears: she would have liked to be taken then to his sheltering arms, never to have left them. “The cause which led to our parting, was the suspicion that fell upon Arthur, coupled with something that you were not pleased with in my own manner relating to it. That suspicion is upon him still; and my course of conduct would be precisely the same, were it to come over again. I am sorry you should have reaped up this matter, for it can only end as it did before.”
“Will you not marry me?” he resumed.