“Don't go just yet, dear Constance,” she said. “Why do you try to—shut me out of your heart? Oh, if you knew how much—how very much I feel for you!”
“What about?” said the other a little sharply, and drawing herself back.
“What about! We are both thinking of the same thing.”
“Yes, very likely, but what of that? Is it such a great thing that you need to distress yourself so much about it?”
“How can I help being distressed at such a thing; it has changed everything, and will make you so unhappy. You know that you can't marry Mr. Chance now after he has deceived you in that way.”
“Can't marry Mr. Chance!” exclaimed Constance, putting her friend from her. “Do you imagine that the wretched malicious gossip of those two men in the train will have the slightest effect on me! What a mistake you are making!”
“But you know it is true,” returned Fan with strange simplicity; and this imprudent speech quickly brought on her a tempest of anger. When the heart is burdened with a great anguish which cannot be expressed there is nothing like a burst of passion to relieve it. Tear-shedding is a weak ineffectual remedy compared with this burning counter-irritant of the mind.
“I do not know that it is true!” she exclaimed. “What right have you to say such a thing, as if you knew Merton so well, and had weighed him in an infallible balance and found him wanting! I have heard nothing but malicious tittle-tattle, a falsehood beneath contempt, set afloat by some enemy of Merton's. If I could have thought it true for one moment I should never cease to despise myself. Have you forgotten how you blazed out against me for speaking my mind about Miss Starbrow when she cast you off? Yet you did not know her as I know Merton, and how paltry a thing is the feeling you have for her compared with that which I have for my future husband! What does it matter to me what they said?—I know him better. But you have been prejudiced against him from the beginning, for no other reason but because I loved him. Nothing but selfishness was at the bottom of that feeling. You imagined that marriage would put an end to our friendship, and thought nothing about my happiness, but only of your own.”
“Do you believe that of me, Constance?” said Fan, greatly distressed. “Ah, I remember when we had that trouble about Mary's letter at Eyethorne, you said that you had not known me until that day. You do not know me now if you think that your happiness is nothing to me—if you think that it is less to me than my own.”
Her words, her look, the tone of her voice touched Constance to the heart.