"Perhaps not, but nothing can excuse the sacrifice you are making of your life. Consider, Hermione. Why should you? Have you not duties to the present, as well as to the past? Should you not think of the long years that may lie between this hour and a possible old age, years which might be filled with beneficence and love, but which now----" "Emma, Emma, what are you saying? Are you so tired of sharing my fate that you would try to make me traitor to my word, traitor to my love----" "Hush," whispered again Emma, "you do not love _him_. Answer me, if you do. Plunge deep into your heart, and say if you feel as you did once; I want to hear the words from your lips, but be honest." "Would it be any credit to me if I did not? Would you think more of me if I acknowledged the past was a mistake, and that I wrecked my life for a passion which a year's absence could annul." But the tender Emma was inexorable, and held her sister by the hands while she repeated. "Answer, answer! or I shall take your very refusal for a reply." But Hermione only drooped her head, and finally drew away her hands. "You seem to prefer the cause of this new man," she murmured ironically. "Perhaps you think he will make the better brother-in-law." The flush on Emma's cheek spread till it dyed her whole neck. "I think," she observed gravely, "that Mr. Etheridge is the more devoted to you, Hermione. Dr. Sellick--" what did not that name cost her?--"has not even looked up at our windows when riding by the house." Hermione's eye flashed, and she bounded imperiously to her feet. "And that is why I think that he still remembers. And shall I forget?" she murmured more softly, "while he cherishes one thought of grief or chagrin over the past?" Emma, whose head had fallen on her breast, played idly with her long hair, and softly drew it across her face. "If you knew," she murmured, "that he did not cherish one thought such as you imagine, would you then open your heart to this new love and the brightness in the world and all the hopes which belong to our time of life." "If, if," repeated Hermione, staring at the half-hidden face of her sister as at some stranger whom she had found persistent and incomprehensible. "I don't know what you mean by your _ifs_. Do you think it would add to my content and self-satisfaction to hear that I had reared this ghastly prison which I inhabit on a foundation of sand, and that the walls in toppling would crash about my ears and destroy me? You must have a strange idea of a woman's heart, if you thought it would make me any readier to face life if I knew I had sacrificed my all to a chimera." Emma sighed. "Not if it gave you a new hope," she whispered. "Ah," murmured Hermione, and her face softened for the first time. "I dare not think of that," she murmured. "I dare not, Emma; I DARE NOT." The younger sister, as if answered, threw back her hair and looked at Hermione quite brightly.