Harry determined that instant to throw his last die at once on this evident chance that opened up so temptingly before him, and said with fervour, bending forward towards her: ‘I hope, Miss Dupuy, when you are next in England, you’ll have the opportunity of seeing many, and some day of becoming the mistress of the finest in Lincolnshire. I told you at Southampton, you know, that I would follow you to Trinidad, and I’ve kept my promise.—Oh, Miss Dupuy, I hope you don’t mean to say no to me this time again! We have each had twelve months more to make up our minds in. During all those twelve months, I have only learned every day, whether in England or in Trinidad, to love you better. I have felt compelled to come out here and ask you to accept me. And you—haven’t you found your heart growing any softer meanwhile towards me? Will you unsay now the refusal you gave me a year ago over in England?’
He spoke in a soft persuasive voice, which thrilled through Nora’s very inmost being; and as she looked at him, so handsome, so fluent, so well born, so noble-looking, she could hardly refrain from whispering low a timid ‘Yes,’ on the impulse of the moment. But something that was to her almost as the prick of conscience arose at once irresistibly within her, and she motioned away quickly, with a little gesture of positive horror, the hand with which Harry strove half forcibly to take her own. The image of scowling Isaac Pourtalès as he emerged, all unexpectedly, from the shadow the night before, rose up now in strange vividness before her eyes and blinded her vision; next moment, for the first time in her life, she perceived hurriedly that Isaac not only resembled Lady Noel, but quite as closely resembled in face and feature Harry also. That unhappy resemblance was absolutely fatal to poor Harry’s doubtful chance of final acceptance. Nora shrank back, half frightened and wholly disenchanted, as far as she could go, in her own chair, and answered in a suddenly altered voice: ‘Oh, Mr Noel, I didn’t know you were going to begin that subject again; I thought we met on neutral ground, merely as friends now. I—I gave you my answer definitely long ago at Southampton. There has been nothing—nothing of any sort—to make me alter it since I spoke to you then. I like you—I like you very much indeed; and I’m so grateful to you for standing up as you have stood up for Mr Hawthorn and for poor dear Marian—but I can never, never, never—never marry you!’
Harry drew back hastily with sudden surprise and great astonishment. He had felt almost sure she was going this time really to accept him; everything she said had sounded so exactly as if she meant at last to take him. The disappointment took away his power of fluent speech. He could only ask, in a suddenly checked undertone: ‘Why, Miss Dupuy? You will at least tell me, before you dismiss me for ever, why your answer is so absolutely final.’
Nora took up the little patch of crewel-work she had momentarily dropped, and pretended, with rigid, trembling fingers, to be stitching away at it most industriously. ‘I cannot tell you,’ she answered very slowly, after a moment’s long hesitation: ‘don’t ask me. I can never tell you.’
Harry rose and gazed at her anxiously. ‘You cannot mean to say,’ he whispered, bending down towards her till their two faces almost touched one another, ‘that you are going willingly to marry your cousin, for whom your father intends you? Miss Dupuy, that would be most unworthy of you! You do not love him! You cannot love him!’
‘I hate him!’ Nora answered with sudden vehemence; and at the words, the blood rushed hot again into Harry’s cheek, and he whispered once more: ‘Then, why do you say—why do you say, Nora, you will never marry me?’
At the sound of her name, so uttered by Harry Noel’s lips, Nora rose and stood confronting him with crimson face and trembling fingers. ‘Because, Mr Noel,’ she answered slowly and with emphasis, ‘an impassable barrier stands for ever fixed and immovable between us!’
‘Can she mean,’ Harry thought to himself hastily, ‘that she considers my position in life too far above her own to allow of her marrying me?—O no; impossible, impossible! A lady’s a lady wherever she may be; and nobody could ever be more of a lady, in every action and every movement, than Nora, my Nora. She shall be my Nora. I must win her over. But I can’t say it to her; I can’t answer her little doubt as to her perfect equality with me; it would be far too great presumption even to suggest it.’
Well it was, indeed, for Harry Noel that he didn’t hint aloud in the mildest form this unlucky thought, that flashed for one indivisible second of time across the mirror of his inner consciousness; if he had, heaven only knows whether Nora would have darted away angrily like a wounded tigress from the polluted veranda, or would have stood there petrified and chained to the spot, like a Gorgon-struck Greek figure in pure white marble, at the bare idea that any creature upon God’s earth should even for a passing moment appear to consider himself superior in position to a single daughter of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove, Trinidad!
‘Then you dismiss me for ever?’ Harry asked quivering.