“Which we were not. Now attend! All that familiarity may be understood in a guardian and ward, who are, besides, known to be betrothed to each other, and who keep their tacit promise to society by marriage. Now, listen! if you should not consent to marry me——” “If I do not! I will not. There is no if.” “Then all your beauty, wealth, and talent, with all the power they give you, avail you nothing. You are an outcast!” She dropped into her chair again, she paled even to her lips, the fire died out of her eyes, and even from every lurid ring of her dark, bright hair. He gazed at her ironically, saying slowly: “Ah! you do not care for the opinion of the world.” “Do I not?” she exclaimed, with sudden and impassioned energy, “do I not aspire to the honor of all the world? Do I not know and feel by all that I am and have, and by all that I purpose to do and to be, that I have a God-given patent to such honor? Has not my soul prophesied it?” “And I repeat to you, haughty woman, that unless you marry me, you will not have it. Your powers are all paralyzed.” She dropped her hands upon her lap, her head upon her bosom, in the collapse of despair. “Ha! trapped, palsied, helpless!” he exclaimed exultingly. “Where is now your vaunted independence? your pride? your scorn? Gone! quite gone! Why, so much the better. You will make the better wife for the loss of that. Come, Garnet, I love you; could worship your beauty, sometimes, only that it seems to spoil you; come, I love you. Let us cease this absurd quarrel and be friends. Come, do not look so despairingly. Harsh and stern as I may be when threatened with your loss, I shall not make such a bad husband. And for the rest—bless me, girl, you know my family and my standing—shall I be such a very ill match for General Garnet’s——” He paused, and she raised her deathlike brow, and, wiping the cold drops of sweat from its pallid surface, said slowly, and with profound sadness: “Oh-h-h! You miserably misconceive my grief. It is this that overwhelms me; it is the thought of your——” “Villainy! Speak out, I will relieve you!” he said sarcastically. “I did not mean to use the word.” “Policy, then! for it was no more nor less; only finish.” “It is this, then, that crushes me with sorrow—the knowledge that you, my only protector, who should have warned my inexperience against the least social mistake, and shielded my good name from the slightest chance of injury; that you, my guardian, having perfect authority over me, and indisputable control of all my actions; that you, my friend, having my perfect confidence and affection, that you should have abused that authority, betrayed that confidence, and wounded that affection by leading me into a course of conduct pre-calculated, pre-contrived, to fetter my choice in woman’s dearest privilege, or to blast my fair fame and palsy my powers of usefulness forever!”