It was hardly the picture to move her.
“But your father will not help you.”
“No, he won’t. I should have to depend entirely upon my work. If I marry without his consent, he says he will give me fifty pounds a year—not even what I have now. But, once I am married and working for myself, I hardly think he will keep to that. It’s a risk, I know. But I would run any risk, dear. Perhaps it isn’t fair to ask you to do it, though,” he added, with a sigh. “Isoline, you can never love me as I love you.”
“It is unkind of you to speak like that,” said she, with an attractive little note of dignity; “if you are in trouble, so am I.”
He took her hand again with an exclamation of self-reproach; one of her most useful weapons was her aptitude for making other people feel themselves in the wrong.
“Dearest, I forget everything but my own unhappiness,” he said penitently.
“It is really dreadful,” exclaimed Isoline. “How happy I was the day that you came here, and now it is all spoilt!”
“But it can never be spoilt as long as we love each other,” cried he. “Isoline, darling, only be true to me, and some day we shall be together.”
“I can’t promise anything. How can I when my uncle forbids it?”
Poor Harry, beating against the door that never resisted, yet never opened, felt helpless. But he gathered himself together.