‘Enough to make it clear to me why you don’t accept this offer. Everything you have said yet is a reason for the reverse. Now, my dear, I am not angry.’
‘Yes you are.’
‘No I’m not. Now what is your reason?’
‘The name of it is Isaac Pierston, down home.’
‘How?’
‘I mean he courted me, and led me on to island custom, and then I went to chapel one morning and married him in secret, because mother didn’t care about him; and I didn’t either by that time. And then he quarrelled with me; and just before you and I came to London he went away to Guernsey. Then I saw a soldier; I never knew his name, but I fell in love with him because I am so quick at that! Still, as it was wrong, I tried not to think of him, and wouldn’t look at him when he passed. But it made me cry very much that I mustn’t. I was then very miserable, and you asked me to come to London. I didn’t care what I did with myself, and I came.’
‘Heaven above us!’ said Pierston, his pale and distressed face showing with what a shock this announcement had come. ‘Why have you done such extraordinary things? Or, rather, why didn’t you tell me of this before? Then, at the present moment you are the wife of a man who is in Guernsey, whom you do not love at all; but instead of him love a soldier whom you have never spoken to; while I have nearly brought scandal upon us both by your letting me love you. Really, you are a very wicked woman!’
‘No, I am not!’ she pouted.
Still, Avice looked pale and rather frightened, and did not lift her eyes from the floor. ‘I said it was nonsense in you to want to have me!’ she went on, ‘and, even if I hadn’t been married to that horrid Isaac Pierston, I couldn’t have married you after you told me that you was the man who ran away from my mother.’
‘I have paid the penalty!’ he said sadly. ‘Men of my sort always get the worst of it somehow. Though I never did your mother any harm. Now, Avice—I’ll call you dear Avice for your mother’s sake and not for your own—I must see what I can do to help you out of the difficulty that unquestionably you are in. Why can’t you love your husband now you have married him?’