“Lily,” he said, “your life and mine have to be decided now. There is neither credit nor comfort in the position of deadly opposition which you have taken up. I may have sinned against you. I told you what was not true about the child, I acknowledge that. I should not have pretended he was dead. I saw my mistake as soon as I had committed it, but it was as ineffectual as it was wrong. You did not believe me for a minute, therefore I did no harm. The rest was all inevitable; it could not be helped. Enough has been said on that subject. But all necessity for these expedients is over now. Every thing is plain sailing before us; we have the best prospects for our life. I can promise that no woman will have a better husband than you will find me. You have a beautiful healthy child who takes to you as if you had never been parted from him for a day. We have a good house to step into——”
“What house?” she cried, surprised.
“Oh, not the garret you were so keen about,” he answered, a smile creeping about the corners of his mouth, “a house worthy of you, fit for you—the house in George Square!”
“Uncle Robert’s house!” she cried, almost with a shriek.
“Yes,” he said, “to which you are the rightful heir, as you are to his money. They are both very safe, I assure you, in my hands.”
“You are,” she said breathlessly, “the proprietor—now?”
“Through you, my bonnie Lily; but there is no mistake or deception about that,” he said, with a short laugh; “they are very safe in my hands.”
No man could be less conscious than Ronald, though he was a man full of ability and understanding, of the effect of these words of his triumph upon his wife’s mind. He thought he was setting before her in the strongest way the advantages there were for her, and both, in agreement and peaceful accord, and how prejudicial to her own position and comfort any thing else would be. He was perhaps a little carried away by his success. Even the experiment of this morning—how thoroughly successful it had been! The child might have been frightened and turned away from the unknown mother: instead of this, by a providential dispensation, he had gone to her without hesitation and behaved himself angelically. How any woman in her senses could resist all the inducements that lay before her, all the excellent reasons there were to accept the present and ignore the past—in which nothing had been done that was not for her interest—he could not tell. He began to be impatient with such folly, and to think it might be well to let her have a glimpse of what, if she rejected this better part, lay on the other side.
Lily had seated herself once more in her chair; it was the great chair she had occupied when the funeral party assembled, and gave her something of the aspect of a judge. She had lost altogether the color and brightness that had come into her face. She was very pale, and the blackness of her mourning made this more visible. And, she sat silent, oh, not convinced, as he hoped—far from that—but struck dumb, not knowing what to say.
At this moment, however, there was another interruption, and the little figure of Helen Blythe, covered, too, with crape and mourning, but with a natural glow and subdued brightness as always upon her morning face, appeared at the door.