They were a long, long time alone. A soft tap at the door, at length announced that some one was without. Oliver opened it, glided away, and gave place to Harry Maylie.
‘I know it all,’ he said, taking a seat beside the lovely girl. ‘Dear Rose, I know it all.’
‘I am not here by accident,’ he added after a lengthened silence; ‘nor have I heard all this to-night, for I knew it yesterday—only yesterday. Do you guess that I have come to remind you of a promise?’
‘Stay,’ said Rose. ‘You do know all.’
‘All. You gave me leave, at any time within a year, to renew the subject of our last discourse.’
‘I did.’
‘Not to press you to alter your determination,’ pursued the young man, ‘but to hear you repeat it, if you would. I was to lay whatever of station or fortune I might possess at your feet, and if you still adhered to your former determination, I pledged myself, by no word or act, to seek to change it.’
‘The same reasons which influenced me then, will influence me now,’ said Rose firmly. ‘If I ever owed a strict and rigid duty to her, whose goodness saved me from a life of indigence and suffering, when should I ever feel it, as I should to-night? It is a struggle,’ said Rose, ‘but one I am proud to make; it is a pang, but one my heart shall bear.’
‘The disclosure of to-night,’—Harry began.
‘The disclosure of to-night,’ replied Rose softly, ‘leaves me in the same position, with reference to you, as that in which I stood before.’