“Pray speak, my lord.”
“A spiteful tongue has whispered it abroad that you have to-day given your plighted lover a cold reception.”
“Who is my plighted lover?”
“Mr. Harry Temple. Tell me, Miss Pleydell, if there is any promise between you and this gentleman?”
He looked at me in such a way as made me both rejoice and tremble.
“No, my lord,” I said, blushing against my will, and to my great confusion; “I am not promised to Mr. Temple. Will your lordship take me to the dancing-room?”
It was a bright moonlight night when we came away. We walked home, escorted by some of the gentlemen. Lord Chudleigh, as he stooped to take my hand, raised it rapidly to his lips and pressed my fingers. The action was not seen, I think, by the others.
That night I tried to put the case plainly to myself.
I said: “Kitty, my dear, the man you want above all other men to fall in love with you has done it; at least, it seems so. He seeks you perpetually; he talks to you; he singles you out from the rest; he is jealous; his eyes follow you about; he sends fruit and flowers to you; he gives an entertainment, and calls you the Queen of the Feast; he presses your hand and kisses your fingers. What more, Kitty, would you have?”
On the other hand, I thought: “If he falls in love with you, being already married, as he believes, to another woman, he commits a sin against his marriage vows. Yet what sin can there be in breaking vows pronounced in such a state as he was in, and in such a way? Why, they seem to me no vows at all, in spite of the validity of the Doctor’s orders and the so-called blessing of the Church. Yet he cannot part from his wife by simply wishing; and, knowing that, he does actually commit the sin of deceit in loving another woman.