“Don’t return thanks for it,” she forbade him quickly, “when it is my loss. Oh, Harry! I am yours—yours in our hearts; but I would I were yours so that no man could contradict it, anyhow or anywhere,” sighed Lady Bell, clinging to him with a creeping quailing foretaste of all the evils which might be wrought by distance, time, the remonstrances of friends, the misrepresentations of enemies. CHAPTER XX. TO TIE OR NOT TO TIE THE KNOT? “Take care, Lady Bell!” exclaimed Harry, in rising agitation, “lest I’m only delivered from one temptation to be plunged into another.” “Ah! temptations have no power for you,” proclaimed Lady Bell, with a mixture of pride and sorrow; “you are as firm as a rock, and as unyielding when you think you are in the right.” “Don’t be too sure,” said Captain Fane, and she saw that he could be nervous with all his firmness. “I have let you say how you will want me, because it has been marrow to my bones and joy to my heart, Bell, when God knows I am anxious and sad enough. But at least you do not resign me to the importunities of any rival, unless it be to the image of Britannia herself,” he suggested, with an effort at a jest and a smile, “flourishing, as our general figurehead, and to the death which she may bear in her hand. Think what I must feel to leave you, exposed to the cunning wiles of all the beaux and bucks and great matches who hunt women as men hunt game. These men play with women, and have no remorse—for not believing in a God in heaven, they do not believe in a man or woman on earth. They seek to buy women, and sooner than be foiled in the base barter which they propose, and be forced to confess their titles, rent-rolls, money-bags, even their pretty persons, disparaged, they will try to get the better of women by cruel arts. Such men betray women infernally.” He had worked himself up till he was pouring forth a torrent of rage, hatred, and apprehension. Cold as the morning was, he had to wipe his forehead. “Why, Harry!” remonstrated Lady Bell, startled, but not altogether offended by his jealous fury, not unwilling to be roused from the dejection into which she was sinking, and to be diverted for a moment from the gloomy prospect before her.