“How should I greet thee?”
Love frequently dies of time alone—much more frequently of
displacement. With Elfride Swancourt, a powerful reason why the
displacement should be successful was that the new-comer was a greater
man than the first. By the side of the instructive and piquant
snubbings she received from Knight, Stephen’s general agreeableness
seemed watery; by the side of Knight’s spare love-making, Stephen’s
continual outflow seemed lackadaisical. She had begun to sigh for
somebody further on in manhood. Stephen was hardly enough of a man.
Perhaps there was a proneness to inconstancy in her nature—a nature, to
those who contemplate it from a standpoint beyond the influence of that
inconstancy, the most exquisite of all in its plasticity and ready
sympathies. Partly, too, Stephen’s failure to make his hold on her
heart a permanent one was his too timid habit of dispraising himself
beside her—a peculiarity which, exercised towards sensible men, stirs a
kindly chord of attachment that a marked assertiveness would leave
untouched, but inevitably leads the most sensible woman in the world to
undervalue him who practises it. Directly domineering ceases in the
man, snubbing begins in the woman; the trite but no less unfortunate
fact being that the gentler creature rarely has the capacity to
appreciate fair treatment from her natural complement. The abiding
perception of the position of Stephen’s parents had, of course, a
little to do with Elfride’s renunciation. To such girls poverty may not
be, as to the more worldly masses of humanity, a sin in itself; but it
is a sin, because graceful and dainty manners seldom exist in such an
atmosphere. Few women of old family can be thoroughly taught that a
fine soul may wear a smock-frock, and an admittedly common man in one
is but a worm in their eyes. John Smith’s rough hands and clothes, his
wife’s dialect, the necessary narrowness of their ways, being
constantly under Elfride’s notice, were not without their deflecting
influence.
On reaching home after the perilous adventure by the sea-shore, Knight
had felt unwell, and retired almost immediately. The young lady who had
so materially assisted him had done the same, but she reappeared,
properly clothed, about five o’clock. She wandered restlessly about the
house, but not on account of their joint narrow escape from death. The
storm which had torn the tree had merely bowed the reed, and with the
deliverance of Knight all deep thought of the accident had left her.
The mutual avowal which it had been the means of precipitating occupied
a far longer length of her meditations.
Elfride’s disquiet now was on account of that miserable promise to meet
Stephen, which returned like a spectre again and again. The perception
of his littleness beside Knight grew upon her alarmingly. She now
thought how sound had been her father’s advice to her to give him up,
and was as passionately desirous of following it as she had hitherto
been averse. Perhaps there is nothing more hardening to the tone of
young minds than thus to discover how their dearest and strongest
wishes become gradually attuned by Time the Cynic to the very note of
some selfish policy which in earlier days they despised.
The hour of appointment came, and with it a crisis; and with the crisis
a collapse.
“God forgive me—I can’t meet Stephen!” she exclaimed to herself. “I
don’t love him less, but I love Mr. Knight more!”
Yes: she would save herself from a man not fit for her—in spite of
vows. She would obey her father, and have no more to do with Stephen
Smith. Thus the fickle resolve showed signs of assuming the complexion
of a virtue.
The following days were passed without any definite avowal from
Knight’s lips. Such solitary walks and scenes as that witnessed by
Smith in the summer-house were frequent, but he courted her so
intangibly that to any but such a delicate perception as Elfride’s it
would have appeared no courtship at all. The time now really began to
be sweet with her. She dismissed the sense of sin in her past actions,
and was automatic in the intoxication of the moment. The fact that
Knight made no actual declaration was no drawback. Knowing since the
betrayal of his sentiments that love for her really existed, she
preferred it for the present in its form of essence, and was willing to
avoid for awhile the grosser medium of words. Their feelings having
been forced to a rather premature demonstration, a reaction was
indulged in by both.
But no sooner had she got rid of her troubled conscience on the matter
of faithlessness than a new anxiety confronted her. It was lest Knight
should accidentally meet Stephen in the parish, and that herself should
be the subject of discourse.
Elfride, learning Knight more thoroughly, perceived that, far from
having a notion of Stephen’s precedence, he had no idea that she had
ever been wooed before by anybody. On ordinary occasions she had a
tongue so frank as to show her whole mind, and a mind so
straightforward as to reveal her heart to its innermost shrine. But the
time for a change had come. She never alluded to even a knowledge of
Knight’s friend. When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more
often than not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second
lover.
The elopement was now a spectre worse than the first, and, like the
Spirit in Glenfinlas, it waxed taller with every attempt to lay it. Her
natural honesty invited her to confide in Knight, and trust to his
generosity for forgiveness: she knew also that as mere policy it would
be better to tell him early if he was to be told at all. The longer her
concealment the more difficult would be the revelation. But she put it
off. The intense fear which accompanies intense love in young women was
too strong to allow the exercise of a moral quality antagonistic to
itself:
“Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.”
The match was looked upon as made by her father and mother. The vicar
remembered her promise to reveal the meaning of the telegram she had
received, and two days after the scene in the summer-house, asked her
pointedly. She was frank with him now.
“I had been corresponding with Stephen Smith ever since he left
England, till lately,” she calmly said.
“What!” cried the vicar aghast; “under the eyes of Mr. Knight, too?”
“No; when I found I cared most for Mr. Knight, I obeyed you.”
“You were very kind, I’m sure. When did you begin to like Mr. Knight?”
“I don’t see that that is a pertinent question, papa; the telegram was
from the shipping agent, and was not sent at my request. It announced
the arrival of the vessel bringing him home.”
“Home! What, is he here?”
“Yes; in the village, I believe.”
“Has he tried to see you?”
“Only by fair means. But don’t, papa, question me so! It is torture.”
“I will only say one word more,” he replied. “Have you met him?”
“I have not. I can assure you that at the present moment there is no
more of an understanding between me and the young man you so much
disliked than between him and you. You told me to forget him; and I
have forgotten him.”
“Oh, well; though you did not obey me in the beginning, you are a good
girl, Elfride, in obeying me at last.”
“Don’t call me ‘good,’ papa,” she said bitterly; “you don’t know—and
the less said about some things the better. Remember, Mr. Knight knows
nothing about the other. Oh, how wrong it all is! I don’t know what I
am coming to.”
“As matters stand, I should be inclined to tell him; or, at any rate, I
should not alarm myself about his knowing. He found out the other day
that this was the parish young Smith’s father lives in—what puts you in
such a flurry?”
“I can’t say; but promise—pray don’t let him know! It would be my
ruin!”
“Pooh, child. Knight is a good fellow and a clever man; but at the same
time it does not escape my perceptions that he is no great catch for
you. Men of his turn of mind are nothing so wonderful in the way of
husbands. If you had chosen to wait, you might have mated with a much
wealthier man. But remember, I have not a word to say against your
having him, if you like him. Charlotte is delighted, as you know.”
“Well, papa,” she said, smiling hopefully through a sigh, “it is nice
to feel that in giving way to—to caring for him, I have pleased my
family. But I am not good; oh no, I am very far from that!”
“None of us are good, I am sorry to say,” said her father blandly; “but
girls have a chartered right to change their minds, you know. It has
been recognized by poets from time immemorial. Catullus says, ‘Mulier
cupido quod dicit amanti, in vento—’ What a memory mine is! However,
the passage is, that a woman’s words to a lover are as a matter of
course written only on wind and water. Now don’t be troubled about
that, Elfride.”
“Ah, you don’t know!”
They had been standing on the lawn, and Knight was now seen lingering
some way down a winding walk. When Elfride met him, it was with a much
greater lightness of heart; things were more straightforward now. The
responsibility of her fickleness seemed partly shifted from her own
shoulders to her father’s. Still, there were shadows.
“Ah, could he have known how far I went with Stephen, and yet have said
the same, how much happier I should be!” That was her prevailing
thought.
In the afternoon the lovers went out together on horseback for an hour
or two; and though not wishing to be observed, by reason of the late
death of Lady Luxellian, whose funeral had taken place very privately
on the previous day, they yet found it necessary to pass East Endelstow
Church.
The steps to the vault, as has been stated, were on the outside of the
building, immediately under the aisle wall. Being on horseback, both
Knight and Elfride could overlook the shrubs which screened the
church-yard.
“Look, the vault seems still to be open,” said Knight.
“Yes, it is open,” she answered
“Who is that man close by it? The mason, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if it is John Smith, Stephen’s father?”
“I believe it is,” said Elfride, with apprehension.
“Ah, and can it be? I should like to inquire how his son, my truant
protegé, is going on. And from your father’s description of the vault,
the interior must be interesting. Suppose we go in.”
“Had we better, do you think? May not Lord Luxellian be there?”
“It is not at all likely.”
Elfride then assented, since she could do nothing else. Her heart,
which at first had quailed in consternation, recovered itself when she
considered the character of John Smith. A quiet unassuming man, he
would be sure to act towards her as before those love passages with his
son, which might have given a more pretentious mechanic airs. So
without much alarm she took Knight’s arm after dismounting, and went
with him between and over the graves. The master-mason recognized her
as she approached, and, as usual, lifted his hat respectfully.
“I know you to be Mr. Smith, my former friend Stephen’s father,” said
Knight, directly he had scanned the embrowned and ruddy features of
John.
“Yes, sir, I b’lieve I be.”
“How is your son now? I have only once heard from him since he went to
India. I daresay you have heard him speak of me—Mr. Knight, who became
acquainted with him some years ago in Exonbury.”
“Ay, that I have. Stephen is very well, thank you, sir, and he’s in
England; in fact, he’s at home. In short, sir, he’s down in the vault
there, a-looking at the departed coffins.”
Elfride’s heart fluttered like a butterfly.
Knight looked amazed. “Well, that is extraordinary.” he murmured. “Did
he know I was in the parish?”
“I really can’t say, sir,” said John, wishing himself out of the
entanglement he rather suspected than thoroughly understood.
“Would it be considered an intrusion by the family if we went into the
vault?”
“Oh, bless ye, no, sir; scores of folk have been stepping down. ’Tis
left open a-purpose.”
“We will go down, Elfride.”
“I am afraid the air is close,” she said appealingly.
“Oh no, ma’am,” said John. “We white-limed the walls and arches the day
’twas opened, as we always do, and again on the morning of the funeral;
the place is as sweet as a granary.
“Then I should like you to accompany me, Elfie; having originally
sprung from the family too.”
“I don’t like going where death is so emphatically present. I’ll stay
by the horses whilst you go in; they may get loose.”
“What nonsense! I had no idea your sentiments were so flimsily formed
as to be perturbed by a few remnants of mortality; but stay out, if you
are so afraid, by all means.”
“Oh no, I am not afraid; don’t say that.”
She held miserably to his arm, thinking that, perhaps, the revelation
might as well come at once as ten minutes later, for Stephen would be
sure to accompany his friend to his horse.
At first, the gloom of the vault, which was lighted only by a couple of
candles, was too great to admit of their seeing anything distinctly;
but with a further advance Knight discerned, in front of the black
masses lining the walls, a young man standing, and writing in a
pocket-book.
Knight said one word: “Stephen!”
Stephen Smith, not being in such absolute ignorance of Knight’s
whereabouts as Knight had been of Smith’s instantly recognized his
friend, and knew by rote the outlines of the fair woman standing behind
him.
Stephen came forward and shook him by the hand, without speaking.
“Why have you not written, my boy?” said Knight, without in any way
signifying Elfride’s presence to Stephen. To the essayist, Smith was
still the country lad whom he had patronized and tended; one to whom
the formal presentation of a lady betrothed to himself would have
seemed incongruous and absurd.
“Why haven’t you written to me?” said Stephen.
“Ah, yes. Why haven’t I? why haven’t we? That’s always the query which
we cannot clearly answer without an unsatisfactory sense of our
inadequacies. However, I have not forgotten you, Smith. And now we have
met; and we must meet again, and have a longer chat than this can
conveniently be. I must know all you have been doing. That you have
thriven, I know, and you must teach me the way.”
Elfride stood in the background. Stephen had read the position at a
glance, and immediately guessed that she had never mentioned his name
to Knight. His tact in avoiding catastrophes was the chief quality
which made him intellectually respectable, in which quality he far
transcended Knight; and he decided that a tranquil issue out of the
encounter, without any harrowing of the feelings of either Knight or
Elfride, was to be attempted if possible. His old sense of indebtedness
to Knight had never wholly forsaken him; his love for Elfride was
generous now.
As far as he dared look at her movements he saw that her bearing
towards him would be dictated by his own towards her; and if he acted
as a stranger she would do likewise as a means of deliverance.
Circumstances favouring this course, it was desirable also to be rather
reserved towards Knight, to shorten the meeting as much as possible.
“I am afraid that my time is almost too short to allow even of such a
pleasure,” he said. “I leave here to-morrow. And until I start for the
Continent and India, which will be in a fortnight, I shall have hardly
a moment to spare.”
Knight’s disappointment and dissatisfied looks at this reply sent a
pang through Stephen as great as any he had felt at the sight of
Elfride. The words about shortness of time were literally true, but
their tone was far from being so. He would have been gratified to talk
with Knight as in past times, and saw as a dead loss to himself that,
to save the woman who cared nothing for him, he was deliberately
throwing away his friend.
“Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” said Knight, in a changed tone. “But of
course, if you have weighty concerns to attend to, they must not be
neglected. And if this is to be our first and last meeting, let me say
that I wish you success with all my heart!” Knight’s warmth revived
towards the end; the solemn impressions he was beginning to receive
from the scene around them abstracting from his heart as a puerility
any momentary vexation at words. “It is a strange place for us to meet
in,” he continued, looking round the vault.
Stephen briefly assented, and there was a silence. The blackened
coffins were now revealed more clearly than at first, the whitened
walls and arches throwing them forward in strong relief. It was a scene
which was remembered by all three as an indelible mark in their
history. Knight, with an abstracted face, was standing between his
companions, though a little in advance of them, Elfride being on his
right hand, and Stephen Smith on his left. The white daylight on his
right side gleamed faintly in, and was toned to a blueness by contrast
with the yellow rays from the candle against the wall. Elfride, timidly
shrinking back, and nearest the entrance, received most of the light
therefrom, whilst Stephen was entirely in candlelight, and to him the
spot of outer sky visible above the steps was as a steely blue patch,
and nothing more.
“I have been here two or three times since it was opened,” said
Stephen. “My father was engaged in the work, you know.”
“Yes. What are you doing?” Knight inquired, looking at the note-book
and pencil Stephen held in his hand.
“I have been sketching a few details in the church, and since then I
have been copying the names from some of the coffins here. Before I
left England I used to do a good deal of this sort of thing.”
“Yes; of course. Ah, that’s poor Lady Luxellian, I suppose.” Knight
pointed to a coffin of light satin-wood, which stood on the stone
sleepers in the new niche. “And the remainder of the family are on this
side. Who are those two, so snug and close together?”
Stephen’s voice altered slightly as he replied “That’s Lady Elfride
Kingsmore—born Luxellian, and that is Arthur, her husband. I have heard
my father say that they—he—ran away with her, and married her against
the wish of her parents.”
“Then I imagine this to be where you got your Christian name, Miss
Swancourt?” said Knight, turning to her. “I think you told me it was
three or four generations ago that your family branched off from the
Luxellians?”
“She was my grandmother,” said Elfride, vainly endeavouring to moisten
her dry lips before she spoke. Elfride had then the conscience-stricken
look of Guido’s Magdalen, rendered upon a more childlike form. She kept
her face partially away from Knight and Stephen, and set her eyes upon
the sky visible outside, as if her salvation depended upon quickly
reaching it. Her left hand rested lightly within Knight’s arm, half
withdrawn, from a sense of shame at claiming him before her old lover,
yet unwilling to renounce him; so that her glove merely touched his
sleeve. “‘Can one be pardoned, and retain the offence?’” quoted
Elfride’s heart then.
Conversation seemed to have no self-sustaining power, and went on in
the shape of disjointed remarks. “One’s mind gets thronged with
thoughts while standing so solemnly here,” Knight said, in a measured
quiet voice. “How much has been said on death from time to time! how
much we ourselves can think upon it! We may fancy each of these who lie
here saying:
“For Thou, to make my fall more great,
Didst lift me up on high.”
What comes next, Elfride? It is the Hundred-and-second Psalm I am
thinking of.”
“Yes, I know it,” she murmured, and went on in a still lower voice,
seemingly afraid for any words from the emotional side of her nature to
reach Stephen:
“‘My days, just hastening to their end,
Are like an evening shade;
My beauty doth, like wither’d grass,
With waning lustre fade.’”
“Well,” said Knight musingly, “let us leave them. Such occasions as
these seem to compel us to roam outside ourselves, far away from the
fragile frame we live in, and to expand till our perception grows so
vast that our physical reality bears no sort of proportion to it. We
look back upon the weak and minute stem on which this luxuriant growth
depends, and ask, Can it be possible that such a capacity has a
foundation so small? Must I again return to my daily walk in that
narrow cell, a human body, where worldly thoughts can torture me? Do we
not?”
“Yes,” said Stephen and Elfride.
“One has a sense of wrong, too, that such an appreciative breadth as a
sentient being possesses should be committed to the frail casket of a
body. What weakens one’s intentions regarding the future like the
thought of this?...However, let us tune ourselves to a more cheerful
chord, for there’s a great deal to be done yet by us all.”
As Knight meditatively addressed his juniors thus, unconscious of the
deception practised, for different reasons, by the severed hearts at
his side, and of the scenes that had in earlier days united them, each
one felt that he and she did not gain by contrast with their musing
mentor. Physically not so handsome as either the youthful architect or
the vicar’s daughter, the thoroughness and integrity of Knight
illuminated his features with a dignity not even incipient in the other
two. It is difficult to frame rules which shall apply to both sexes,
and Elfride, an undeveloped girl, must, perhaps, hardly be laden with
the moral responsibilities which attach to a man in like circumstances.
The charm of woman, too, lies partly in her subtleness in matters of
love. But if honesty is a virtue in itself, Elfride, having none of it
now, seemed, being for being, scarcely good enough for Knight. Stephen,
though deceptive for no unworthy purpose, was deceptive after all; and
whatever good results grace such strategy if it succeed, it seldom
draws admiration, especially when it fails.
On an ordinary occasion, had Knight been even quite alone with Stephen,
he would hardly have alluded to his possible relationship to Elfride.
But moved by attendant circumstances Knight was impelled to be
confiding.
“Stephen,” he said, “this lady is Miss Swancourt. I am staying at her
father’s house, as you probably know.” He stepped a few paces nearer to
Smith, and said in a lower tone: “I may as well tell you that we are
engaged to be married.”
Low as the words had been spoken, Elfride had heard them, and awaited
Stephen’s reply in breathless silence, if that could be called silence
where Elfride’s dress, at each throb of her heart, shook and indicated
it like a pulse-glass, rustling also against the wall in reply to the
same throbbing. The ray of daylight which reached her face lent it a
blue pallor in comparison with those of the other two.
“I congratulate you,” Stephen whispered; and said aloud, “I know Miss
Swancourt—a little. You must remember that my father is a parishioner
of Mr. Swancourt’s.”
“I thought you might possibly not have lived at home since they have
been here.”
“I have never lived at home, certainly, since that time.”
“I have seen Mr. Smith,” faltered Elfride.
“Well, there is no excuse for me. As strangers to each other I ought, I
suppose, to have introduced you: as acquaintances, I should not have
stood so persistently between you. But the fact is, Smith, you seem a
boy to me, even now.”
Stephen appeared to have a more than previous consciousness of the
intense cruelty of his fate at the present moment. He could not repress
the words, uttered with a dim bitterness:
“You should have said that I seemed still the rural mechanic’s son I
am, and hence an unfit subject for the ceremony of introductions.”
“Oh, no, no! I won’t have that.” Knight endeavoured to give his reply a
laughing tone in Elfride’s ears, and an earnestness in Stephen’s: in
both which efforts he signally failed, and produced a forced speech
pleasant to neither. “Well, let us go into the open air again; Miss
Swancourt, you are particularly silent. You mustn’t mind Smith. I have
known him for years, as I have told you.”
“Yes, you have,” she said.
“To think she has never mentioned her knowledge of me!” Smith murmured,
and thought with some remorse how much her conduct resembled his own on
his first arrival at her house as a stranger to the place.
They ascended to the daylight, Knight taking no further notice of
Elfride’s manner, which, as usual, he attributed to the natural shyness
of a young woman at being discovered walking with him on terms which
left not much doubt of their meaning. Elfride stepped a little in
advance, and passed through the churchyard.
“You are changed very considerably, Smith,” said Knight, “and I suppose
it is no more than was to be expected. However, don’t imagine that I
shall feel any the less interest in you and your fortunes whenever you
care to confide them to me. I have not forgotten the attachment you
spoke of as your reason for going away to India. A London young lady,
was it not? I hope all is prosperous?”
“No: the match is broken off.”
It being always difficult to know whether to express sorrow or gladness
under such circumstances—all depending upon the character of the
match—Knight took shelter in the safe words: “I trust it was for the
best.”
“I hope it was. But I beg that you will not press me further: no, you
have not pressed me—I don’t mean that—but I would rather not speak upon
the subject.”
Stephen’s words were hurried.
Knight said no more, and they followed in the footsteps of Elfride, who
still kept some paces in advance, and had not heard Knight’s
unconscious allusion to her. Stephen bade him adieu at the
churchyard-gate without going outside, and watched whilst he and his
sweetheart mounted their horses.
“Good heavens, Elfride,” Knight exclaimed, “how pale you are! I suppose
I ought not to have taken you into that vault. What is the matter?”
“Nothing,” said Elfride faintly. “I shall be myself in a moment. All
was so strange and unexpected down there, that it made me unwell.”
“I thought you said very little. Shall I get some water?”
“No, no.”
“Do you think it is safe for you to mount?”
“Quite—indeed it is,” she said, with a look of appeal.
“Now then—up she goes!” whispered Knight, and lifted her tenderly into
the saddle.
Her old lover still looked on at the performance as he leant over the
gate a dozen yards off. Once in the saddle, and having a firm grip of
the reins, she turned her head as if by a resistless fascination, and
for the first time since that memorable parting on the moor outside St.
Launce’s after the passionate attempt at marriage with him, Elfride
looked in the face of the young man she first had loved. He was the
youth who had called her his inseparable wife many a time, and whom she
had even addressed as her husband. Their eyes met. Measurement of life
should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than
to its actual length. Their glance, but a moment chronologically, was a
season in their history. To Elfride the intense agony of reproach in
Stephen’s eye was a nail piercing her heart with a deadliness no words
can describe. With a spasmodic effort she withdrew her eyes, urged on
the horse, and in the chaos of perturbed memories was oblivious of any
presence beside her. The deed of deception was complete.
Gaining a knoll on which the park transformed itself into wood and
copse, Knight came still closer to her side, and said, “Are you better
now, dearest?”
“Oh yes.” She pressed a hand to her eyes, as if to blot out the image
of Stephen. A vivid scarlet spot now shone with preternatural
brightness in the centre of each cheek, leaving the remainder of her
face lily-white as before.
“Elfride,” said Knight, rather in his old tone of mentor, “you know I
don’t for a moment chide you, but is there not a great deal of
unwomanly weakness in your allowing yourself to be so overwhelmed by
the sight of what, after all, is no novelty? Every woman worthy of the
name should, I think, be able to look upon death with something like
composure. Surely you think so too?”
“Yes; I own it.”
His obtuseness to the cause of her indisposition, by evidencing his
entire freedom from the suspicion of anything behind the scenes, showed
how incapable Knight was of deception himself, rather than any inherent
dulness in him regarding human nature. This, clearly perceived by
Elfride, added poignancy to her self-reproach, and she idolized him the
more because of their difference. Even the recent sight of Stephen’s
face and the sound of his voice, which for a moment had stirred a chord
or two of ancient kindness, were unable to keep down the adoration
re-existent now that he was again out of view.
She had replied to Knight’s question hastily, and immediately went on
to speak of indifferent subjects. After they had reached home she was
apart from him till dinner-time. When dinner was over, and they were
watching the dusk in the drawing-room, Knight stepped out upon the
terrace. Elfride went after him very decisively, on the spur of a
virtuous intention.
“Mr. Knight, I want to tell you something,” she said, with quiet
firmness.
“And what is it about?” gaily returned her lover. “Happiness, I hope.
Do not let anything keep you so sad as you seem to have been to-day.”
“I cannot mention the matter until I tell you the whole substance of
it,” she said. “And that I will do to-morrow. I have been reminded of
it to-day. It is about something I once did, and don’t think I ought to
have done.”
This, it must be said, was rather a mild way of referring to a frantic
passion and flight, which, much or little in itself, only accident had
saved from being a scandal in the public eye.
Knight thought the matter some trifle, and said pleasantly:
“Then I am not to hear the dreadful confession now?”
“No, not now. I did not mean to-night,” Elfride responded, with a
slight decline in the firmness of her voice. “It is not light as you
think it—it troubles me a great deal.” Fearing now the effect of her
own earnestness, she added forcedly, “Though, perhaps, you may think it
light after all.”
“But you have not said when it is to be?”
“To-morrow morning. Name a time, will you, and bind me to it? I want
you to fix an hour, because I am weak, and may otherwise try to get out
of it.” She added a little artificial laugh, which showed how timorous
her resolution was still.
“Well, say after breakfast—at eleven o’clock.”
“Yes, eleven o’clock. I promise you. Bind me strictly to my word.”