"Speak not of dying, my daughter," said the poor mother, hysterically, "I cannot bear it; I am haunted by the fear that I shall at last be left on earth alone. I daily behold you fading before my eyes without the power to avert the fate I see written upon your pale cheek and wasted form. As Robert's wife you would have a luxurious home, the means of gratifying refined tastes, and of contributing to the happiness of others. He may atone to me, by the preservation of one child, for the destruction of the other."
"Mother, your fears for me blind you to the truth. Are not mental griefs far more difficult to bear than the privations of poverty, galling as they are? As Mr. Barclay's wife, I should loathe myself for the hypocrisy I should be compelled to practice toward him; and the wealth for which I had sold myself, would allow me leisure to brood over my own unworthiness, until madness might be the result. No, no, mother -come what may, I never can be so untrue to myself as to become the wife of Robert Barclay."
"God help us, then!" said Mrs. Euston, despondingly.
A carriage drove to the door, and a gentleman alighted from it. Edith heard the bustle, but she did not look out to see what occasioned it, and she was startled from her painful reverie by a knock on the door. She opened it, and started back with a faint cry as she recognized Barclay.
"The landlady told me to come up," he said, as he glanced around the wretched apartment, and a slight twinge of remorse touched his heart as he remarked the changed appearance of Edith. She motioned him to enter, while Mrs. Euston arose from the bed, and offered him a seat.
"I concluded it would be best to reply to your communication in person," said he to Mrs. Euston, as he took the offered chair. "I come with the most liberal intentions, provided Miss Euston will listen to reason. I am grieved to see you in a place so unsuited to your former station as this wretched apartment."
"And yet," said Edith, "I have passed some pleasant hours in this room, comfortless as it looks. So long as I had the hope of being able to provide for our wants by my own exertions, I found contentment in its humble shelter."
"Your happiness must then be truly independent of outward circumstances," replied Barclay, with a touch of his old sarcasm. "I supposed, from the tenor of your mother's petition, that you had begun to repent of your high-toned language to me in our last interview, and would now accede to terms you once spurned, as the price of my assistance to you and yours."
Edith curbed her high spirit, and calmly replied, "You misunderstood my mother's words. As the mother of the late heir, she justly considers herself entitled to a pittance from your estate, and she claimed from your humanity, what she was hopeless of obtaining from your sense of justice. For myself, I hoped for nothing from either, but I acquiesced in her application. I am sorry that you have founded on it expectations which must prove fallacious."
"Then, madam, I need remain no longer," said Barclay, addressing Mrs. Euston. "Your daughter remembers our interview previous to, and after, the death of her brother; the only terms on which I would assist you were then explicitly expressed."