‘Cecilia!’ he cried, aghast.
‘It is true.’
‘What are you saying?’ he exclaimed, almost roughly. ‘What did you promise me? You said that nothing should change you, and I believed it!’
‘Nothing has—nothing can—but, for all that, you must give me up. It is for my aunt’s sake, Gilbert. If you only saw her you would understand what I have gone through. It is no choice of mine. How can you think it is anything to me but despair?’
Speid’s heart sank, and the thing whose shadow had risen as he locked up the jewels and looked at his mother’s face on the wall loomed large again. He guessed the undercurrent of her words.
‘She has not forbidden me to marry you,’ continued Cecilia, ‘but she has told me it will break her heart if I do, and I believe it is true. What is the use of hiding anything from you? There is something in the background that I did not know; but if you imagine that it can make any difference to me, you are not the man I love, not the man I thought. You believe me? You understand?’
‘I understand—I believe,’ he said, turning away his head. ‘Ah, my God!’
‘But you do not doubt me—myself?’ she cried, her heart wrung with fear.
He turned and looked at her. Reproach, suffering, pain unutterable were in his eyes; but there was absolute faith too.
‘But must it be, Cecilia? I am no passive boy to let my life slip between my fingers without an effort. Let me see Lady Eliza. Let me make her understand what she is doing in dividing you and me. I tell you I will see her!’