he truth."

She put her arms round my neck, and rested her head quietly on my
bosom. On the opposite wall hung the miniature portrait of her father.
I bent over her, and saw that she was looking at it while her head lay
on my breast.

"I can never claim my release from my engagement," she went on.
"Whatever way it ends it must end wretchedly for me. All I can do,
Marian, is not to add the remembrance that I have broken my promise and
forgotten my father's dying words, to make that wretchedness worse."

"What is it you propose, then?" I asked.

"To tell Sir Percival Glyde the truth with my own lips," she answered,
"and to let him release me, if he will, not because I ask him, but
because he knows all."

"What do you mean, Laura, by 'all'? Sir Percival will know enough (he
has told me so himself) if he knows that the engagement is opposed to
your own wishes."

"Can I tell him that, when the engagement was made for me by my father,
with my own consent? I should have kept my promise, not happily, I am
afraid, but still contentedly--" she stopped, turned her face to me,
and laid her cheek close against mine--"I should have kept my
engagement, Marian, if another love had not grown up in my heart, which
was not there when I first promised to be Sir Percival's wife."

"Laura! you will never lower yourself by making a confession to him?"

"I shall lower myself, indeed, if I gain my release by hiding from him
what he has a right to know."

"He has not the shadow of a right to know it!"

"Wrong, Marian, wrong! I ought to deceive no one--least of all the man
to whom my father gave me, and to whom I gave myself." She put her lips
to mine, and kissed me. "My own love," she said softly, "you are so
much too fond of me, and so much too proud of me, that you forget, in
my case, what you would remember in your own. Better that Sir Percival
should doubt my motives, and misjudge my conduct if he will, than that
I should be first false to him in thought, and then mean enough to
serve my own interests by hiding the falsehood."

I held her away from me in astonishment. For the first time in our
lives we had changed places--the resolution was all on her side, the
hesitation all on mine. I looked into the pale, quiet, resigned young
face--I saw the pure, innocent heart, in the loving eyes that looked
back at me--and the poor worldly cautions and objections that rose to
my lips dwindled and died away in their own emptiness. I