‘No till I forget myself,’ said Isabel, not knowing what she said; and then there was a sudden stillness round her, and she became aware that she was face to face with her fate.
She raised her eyes, which were veiled with dreams, yet shining with suppressed excitement, to the face of Stapylton, who stood looking down upon her. The man who had tried to beguile her from her last duty to Margaret—who had wooed her and tempted her, and almost spurned her on the braes—who had written that letter—who had left her for a whole year alone to comfort herself as she might, before she could consent to permit the other truer, generous love to console her in her solitude. All this rushed through her mind as she looked up at him; and at the same moment her heart flew from her like a bird, and took refuge, as it were, in his breast. She had no power to help herself.
‘Isabel,’ he said, ‘I have come to say what you would not let me say yesterday. Why should we keep apart, you and I? I have not come to speak of the past—not a word. Thank Heaven it is over. It shall never be mentioned between us. You were my Isabel when my father sent for me; be my Isabel now.’
‘How can that be?’ she said, under her breath.
‘It can be,’ he answered, bending down over her; and—it was not self-delusion on her part—there was a softness in his voice, a tenderness that had never been there before. For the first time Isabel felt a certainty that he was thinking of her, how to be most gentle to her, how to please and to move her, more than of himself. ‘I might have looked for you on the hills as I used to do,’ he went on, ‘but I thought it was best to come here to your own home. Isabel, there is no time for courting now. We cannot play with the thought, and quarrel, and make friends, as we used to do. Life is more serious nowadays. We must be man and wife!’
‘You are not the judge, Mr. Stapylton,’ she cried, with a touch of her old impatience; ‘it is for me to settle that, and not you.’
‘But you will settle it, Isabel. We are older, we should know our own minds, and the time for the braes is over,’ he said. ‘Isabel! you have never been out of my heart. I tried to forget you at first, and then—but I said there was to be nothing of the past.’
‘You succeeded well,’ said Isabel, ‘in forgetting me. There was a year—a whole year——’
He sat down by her and took her hand. She had given up the contest when she thus upbraided him; and it seemed to her, as he seated himself by her side, that a strange long dream was over, and that all things were again as they had been when the two had met upon the braes.
‘I was not a free man;’ he said: ‘my father was lying dying, and he would not die. Don’t question me of that. Is it not all past? And, my darling, you are mine again.’