"Then, for Heaven's sake, go decently, and not herd with a lot of cattle, for emigrants are little better; and do not make yourself a spectacle for the other passengers to gaze upon and wonder about, as they will be sure to do. If you have no pride for yourself, you have no right to disgrace me. How do you think it will sound, some day, that Neil McPherson's wife went out as steerage? Have you no feeling about it?"
"Not in that way--no," Bessie replied. "It seems to me I have been in the steerage all my life, and this can be no worse. Lady Bothwaite went thus to Australia to see how it fared with the passengers."
"Yes, and got herself well laughed at as a lunatic," Neil rejoined. Then, after a pause, he continued, excitedly: "But to come to the point--you must either give up this crazy plan or me. I can have no share in this disgrace, which the world would never forget, and which mother would never forgive. My wife must not come from the steerage."
He spoke with great decision, for he was very angry, and for a moment there was perfect silence between them, while Bessie regarded him fixedly, with an expression on her face which made him uneasy, for he did not quite mean all he had said to her, and there was a strong clinging of his heart to this fragile little girl, who said at last, very softly and low: "You mean it, Neil?--mean what you say?"
"Yes," he answered her. "You must choose steerage or me!"
"Then, Neil," she continued, taking off her engagement-ring and putting it into his hand, "I am afraid it must be steerage. There is your ring; it is all ended between us. And it is better that it is so. I have thought for some time that we could not be happy together with our dissimilar tastes. I should always be doing something you did not like, and which I could not think was wrong. Besides this, we need not deceive ourselves longer with the hope that your mother will ever give her consent to our marriage, for she will not, and as we cannot marry without it, I think it better that we should part; not in anger, Neil," and she laid her hand caressingly upon his arm. "We have loved each other too well for that. We will be friends always, as we are cousins, but never man and wife. We are free, both of us;" and as she spoke there kept coming over her a most delicious sense of relief, as if some burden were being rolled from her, and the expression of her face was not that of a young girl who has just broken with the man she loved.