Her lips again quivered, and she turned weeping away.
"I read my fate in your silence. You love him yet?"
"And shall continue to love him whilst I have life, Geoffrey Moncton," slowly and suffocatingly broke from the pale lips of the trembling girl.
"And you would have been persuaded by your aunt to marry Theophilus Moncton."
"Never! Who told you that?" and her eye flashed proudly, almost scornfully upon me.
"Your good aunt."
"She knows nothing about it. I ceased to oppose her wishes in words, because I found that it might produce a rupture between us. Women of my aunt's age have outlived their sympathies in affairs of the heart. What they once felt they have forgotten, or look upon as a weakness which ought not to be tolerated in their conversations with the young. But look at that fine, candid face, Geoffrey; that open benevolent brow, and tell me, if having once loved the original, it is such an easy matter to forget or to find a substitute in such a being as Theophilus Moncton."
As she said this she took a portrait that was suspended by a gold chain from the inner folds which covered her beautiful bosom, and placed it in my hand.
"Good heavens!" cried I, sinking back upon the pillow, "my friend, George Harrison!"
"Who? I know no one of that name."