“Then Sarah Swallow would have forbidden. Your people must be betrayed in order to enable you to marry, while, at the same time, you cannot make up your mind whom to marry. You will persuade yourself, when you have been married a month, that you have made the wrong choice, after all. If you would give up your living, and work with your conscience in some other employment, instead of sporting with it in this, you might find at last that you had a heart, and that there was some one person who alone could satisfy it. You might be happy, James, after all.” “There is no use in that sort of thing now,” urged James. “Sarah is disposed of, and Mary Lee——” “Disposed of!” said Fanny, fixing her eyes upon him so that his were immediately turned away. “Upon my honour, I had nothing to do with it. It was all their own doing. It was as much news to me as to anybody when Morse came to ask me to marry him.” “I believe you. I acquit you of providing for the prostitution of one whose innocent heart you had just gained, and found it convenient to throw away.” “But the winning and casting off led to the rest,” observed Richard. “I tell you, she threw herself away. The old man sought her because his son loved her,—not because I did. But he is a good old fellow; and after all——” “Silence!” cried Fanny. “Go on, if you dare, to say that to be the slave of an ignorant old man,—the household drudge of a being she despises for marrying her almost as much as she despises herself for marrying him,— say, if you dare, that this is a good enough lot for one whom you yourself taught to feel that she had a mind and a heart, to be free in action, and devoted in affection——” Her eyes rained tears, and her voice trembled so that she could not go on to say that with which her heart was overfull. James began to ask himself whether he had not committed a great mistake in deserting one for whom Fanny seemed to feel so passionate an affection. In the midst of her agitation, Fanny saw his misapprehension. “It is for my sex,—it is for our nature, that I feel it so much,” she struggled to say. “That no more should be understood of what love is by those who are acting in the very name of love! That any one should dare to open only to darken,—to expand only to crush! Anne says, ‘I did say a great deal, but Sarah is so much cleverer now than I am, that I dare not say all that was in my mind. She sees how foolish many things are that we never used to doubt of, and that I do not understand any better now.’ Nothing can be truer. The whole being of the one sister has been awakened, in order to be tortured; and the other can no longer console.” To carry off some emotion which could not be helped, James began to jest. He thought it was only fair,—for the purpose of restoring the sympathy between the sisters,—that he should flirt a little with Anne. “Try;” Fanny said; and she spoke no more. James next made an attempt upon Richard.