'True. But how was he to know that?' 'I don't know. I never thought of anything of that kind,' said

Margaret, reddening, and looking hurt and offended.

'And perhaps he never would, but for the lie,--which, under the

circumstances, I maintain, was necessary.' 'It was not. I know it now. I bitterly repent it.' There was a long pause of silence. Margaret was the first to

speak.

'I am not likely ever to see Mr. Thornton again,'--and there she

stopped.

'There are many things more unlikely, I should say,' replied Mr.

Bell.

'But I believe I never shall. Still, somehow one does not like to

have sunk so low in--in a friend's opinion as I have done in

his.' Her eyes were full of tears, but her voice was steady, and

Mr. Bell was not looking at her. 'And now that Frederick has

given up all hope, and almost all wish of ever clearing himself,

and returning to England, it would be only doing myself justice

to have all this explained. If you please, and if you can, if

there is a good opportunity, (don't force an explanation upon

him, pray,) but if you can, will you tell him the whole

circumstances, and tell him also that I gave you leave to do so,

because I felt that for papa's sake I should not like to lose his

respect, though we may never be likely to meet again?' 'Certainly. I think he ought to know. I do not like you to rest

even under the shadow of an impropriety; he would not know what

to think of seeing you alone with a young man.' 'As for that,' said Margaret, rather haughtily, 'I hold it is

"Honi soit qui mal y pense." Yet still I should choose to have it

explained, if any natural opportunity for easy explanation

occurs. But it is not to clear myself of any suspicion of

improper conduct that I wish to have him told--if I thought that

he had suspected me, I should not care for his good opinion--no!

it is that he may learn how I was tempted, and how I fell into

the snare; why I told that falsehood, in short.' 'Which I don't blame you for. It is no partiality of mine, I

assure you.' 'What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is

nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate

conviction that it was wrong. But we will not talk of that any

more, if you please. It is done--my sin is sinned. I have now to

put it behind me, and be truthful for evermore, if I can.' 'Very well. If you like to be uncomfortable and morbid, be so. I

always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box,

for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size. So

I coax it down again, as the fisherman coaxed the genie.

"Wonderful," say I, "to think that you have been concealed so

long, and in so small a compass, that I really did not know of

your existence. Pray, sir, instead of growing larger and larger

every instant, and bewildering me with your misty outlines, would

you once more compress yourself into your former dimensions?" And

when I've got him down, don't I clap the seal on the vase, and

take good care how I open it again, and how I go against Solomon,

wisest of men, who confined him there.' But it was no smiling matter to Margaret. She hardly attended to

what Mr. Bell was saying. Her thoughts ran upon the Idea, before

entertained, but which now had assumed the strength of a

conviction, that Mr. Thornton no longer held his former good

opinion of her--that he was disappointed in her. She did not feel

as if any explanation could ever reinstate her--not in his love,

for that and any return on her part she had resolved never to

dwell upon, and she kept rigidly to her resolution--but in the

respect and high regard which she had hoped would have ever made

him willing, in the spirit of Gerald Griffin's beautiful lines, 'To turn and look back when thou hearest The sound of my name.' She kept choking and swallowing all the time that she thought

about it. She tried to comfort herself with the idea, that what

he imagined her to be, did not alter the fact of what she was.

But it was a truism, a phantom, and broke down under the weight

of her regret. She had twenty questions on the tip of her tongue

to ask Mr. Bell, but not one of them did she utter. Mr. Bell

thought that she was tired, and sent her early to her room, where

she sate long hours by the open window, gazing out on the purple

dome above, where the stars arose, and twinkled and disappeared

behind the great umbrageous trees before she went to bed. All

night long too, there burnt a little light on earth; a candle in

her old bedroom, which was the nursery with the present

inhabitants of the parsonage, until the new one was built. A

sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and

disappointment, over-powered Margaret. Nothing had been the same;

and this slight, all-pervading instability, had given her greater

pain than if all had been too entirely changed for her to

recognise it.




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