"No, no; I must speak! There can be more reticence now. You would not, you could not have loved him, this heartless, ungrateful profligate, as tasteless and low as he is faithless and vicious,--this scoundrel, who, holding good in his grasp, has deliberately chosen evil. Ay, I will say it, Lady Mitford! You _could_ not have loved him, and you know it well; you have admitted it to yourself before now, when you little dreamed that anyone--that I--would ever dare to put your thought in form and shape before you. What did you love? A girl's fancy,--a shadow, a dream! It was no reality, it had no foundation, and it has vanished. Your imagination drew a picture of an injured victim of circumstances,--a weak being, to be pitied and admired, to be restored and loved! The truth was a selfish scoundrel, who has returned in wealth with fresh zest to the miserable pleasures for which he lived in poverty; a mean-hearted wretch, who could care for your beauty while it was new to him indeed, but to whose perception you, your heart and soul, your intellect and motives, were mysteries as high and as far off as heaven. Are you breaking your heart, Lady Mitford, under the kindly scrutiny of the world, because the thistle has not borne figs and the thorn has not given you purple grapes? Are you sitting down in solitary grief because the animal has done according to its kind, because effect has resulted from cause, because the wisdom of the world, wise in the ways of such men, has verified itself? Do you love this man now? Are you suffering the pangs of jealousy, of despair? No, you do not love him; you are suffering no such pangs. You are truth itself,--the truest and the bravest, as you are the most beautiful of women; and you cannot, you dare not tell me that you love this man still, knowing him as you know him now." He stopped close beside her, and looked at her with an eager, almost a fierce glance. "Why do you ask me?" she gasped out faintly. There was a sudden avoidance of him in her expression, a shadow of fear. "Why do you speak to me thus? Oh, Sir Laurence, this--this is the worst of all." She was not conscious of the effect of the tone in which these words were spoken, of the pathos, the helplessness, the pleading tenderness it implied. But he heard them, and they were enough. They were faint as the murmur of a brook in summer, but mighty as an Alpine storm; and the barriers of conventional restriction, the scruples of conscience, the timidity of a real love, were swept away like straws before their power. "Why?" he repeated, "because I love you!" She uttered a faint exclamation; she half rose from her chair, but he caught her hands and stopped her.