"No laugh ever sounded more fancy free! I felt as if you challenged me; and if he had been here I would have taken up the challenge--he or I, once for all. But he was alone and far away, and I could not take his place. Why did I meet you on the pond, then? why did I come here to-night? Because I wanted to see if I could not go a little further with you. I wanted something to remember, a look, a tone, a word, that ought not to have been given to any man but your promised husband; something I could not have asked if I had hoped to be your husband. My magnanimity toward Ponsonby, you see, did not go the length of behaving to his future wife with the respect I would show my own." "You have shown how much you despise me," said Lily, springing to her feet, her hot tears dried with hotter anger, but her face white again. "That might have been spared me. I suppose you think I deserve it. Very well, I do, and you need not stay to argue the matter. Go!" "Go! Why I should be a fool to go now, and you would be--well, we will call it mistaken--to let me. After we have got as far as we have, it would be absurd to suppose we can go back again. We know each other now better than nine tenths of the couples who have been married a year. I don't ask you to say you love me now; I am very sure you can, and I know I can love you--infinitely----" "Oh, but--but you said you would not take his place--Mr. Ponsonby's. Can you let everyone think you capable of such an act of meanness? And if you could not respect me as your wife, how can you expect others to? Can we appear to act in a way to deserve contempt without despising each other?" "There will be a good deal that is unpleasant about it, no doubt; but everyone's life has some unpleasantness. It would be worse to let a dream, even a dream of honor, come between us and our future. You made a mistake and underestimated its consequences, but it would be foolish to lose the substance of happiness because we have lost the shadow. We will live it down together and be glad it is no worse." "But I have been so wrong, so very wrong--I have too many faults ever to make anyone happy." "Of course you have faults, but I know the worst of them and can put up with them. I have plenty of my own which you may be finding out by this time. I am very domineering--you will have to promise to obey me, and I shall keep you to it; and then I can, under provocation, be furiously jealous." "You are not jealous of Jack Allston?" she whispered. "Jealous of old Jack? Oh, no! I shall keep my jealousy for poor Mr. Ponsonby."