The New Magdalen

"If you must know," he replied, "my mother would have refused to

sanction such a marriage as that."

"No matter how good the girl might have been?"

There was something defiant--almost threatening--in her tone. Horace was

annoyed--and he showed it when he spoke.

"My mother would have respected the girl, without ceasing to respect

herself," he said. "My mother would have remembered what was due to the

family name."

"And she would have said, No?"

"She would have said, No."

"Ah!"

There was an undertone of angry contempt in the exclamation which made

Horace start. "What is the matter?" he asked.

"Nothing," she answered, and took up her embroidery again. There he sat

at her side, anxiously looking at her--his hope in the future centered

in his marriage! In a week more, if she chose, she might enter that

ancient family of which he had spoken so proudly, as his wife. "Oh!" she

thought, "if I didn't love him! if I had only his merciless mother to

think of!"

Uneasily conscious of some estrangement between them, Horace spoke

again. "Surely I have not offended you?" he said.

She turned toward him once more. The work dropped unheeded on her lap.

Her grand eyes softened into tenderness. A smile trembled sadly on her

delicate lips. She laid one hand caressingly on his shoulder. All the

beauty of her voice lent its charm to the next words that she said to

him. The woman's heart hungered in its misery for the comfort that could

only come from his lips.

"_You_ would have loved me, Horace--without stopping to think of the

family name?"

The family name again! How strangely she persisted in coming back to

that! Horace looked at her without answering, trying vainly to fathom

what was passing in her mind.

She took his hand, and wrung it hard--as if she would wring the answer

out of him in that way.

"_You_ would have loved me?" she repeated.

The double spell of her voice and her touch was on him. He answered,

warmly, "Under any circumstances! under any name!"

She put one arm round his neck, and fixed her eyes on his. "Is that

true?" she asked.

"True as t he heaven above us!"

She drank in those few commonplace words with a greedy delight. She

forced him to repeat them in a new form.

"No matter who I might have been? For myself alone?"

"For yourself alone."

She threw both arms round him, and laid her head passionately on his

breast. "I love you! I love you!! I love you!!!" Her voice rose with

hysterical vehemence at each repetition of the words--then suddenly sank

to a low hoarse cry of rage and despair. The sense of her true position

toward him revealed itself in all its horror as the confession of her

love escaped her lips. Her arms dropped from him; she flung herself back

on the sofa-cushions, hiding her face in her hands. "Oh, leave me!" she

moaned, faintly. "Go! go!"