itzgerald is your accepted lover?"

"Yes," she said, looking down upon the ground, and blushing deeply as
she said it.

There was a pause of a few moments, during which she felt that the
full fire of his glance was fixed upon her, and then he spoke.

"You may well be ashamed to confess it," he said; "you may well feel
that you dare not look me in the face as you pronounce the words. I
would have believed it, Clara, from no other mouth than your own."

It appeared to Clara herself now as though she were greatly a
culprit. She had not a word to say in her own defence. All those
arguments as to Owen's ill course of life were forgotten; and she
could only remember that she had acknowledged that she loved him, and
that she was now acknowledging that she loved another.

But now Owen had made his accusation; and as it was not answered, he
hardly knew how to proceed. He walked about the room, endeavouring to
think what he had better say next.

"I know this, Clara; it is your mother's doing, and not your own. You
could not bring yourself to be false, unless by her instigation."

"No," said she; "you are wrong there. It is not my mother's doing:
what I have done, I have done myself."

"Is it not true," he asked, "that your word was pledged to me? Had
you not promised me that you would be my wife?"

"I was very young," she said, falling back upon the only excuse which
occurred to her at the moment as being possible to be used without
incriminating him.

"Young! Is not that your mother's teaching? Why, those were her very
words when she came to me at my house. I did not know that youth was
any excuse for falsehood."

"But it may be an excuse for folly," said Clara.

"Folly! what folly? The folly of loving a poor suitor; the folly of
being willing to marry a man who has not a large estate! Clara, I did
not think that you could have learned so much in so short a time."

All this was very hard upon her. She felt that it was hard, for she
knew that he had done that which entitled her to regard her pledge to
him as at an end; but the circumstances were such that she could not
excuse herself.

"Am I to understand," said Owen Fitzgerald, "that all that has passed
between us is to go for nothing? that such promises as we have made
to each other are to be of no account? To me they are sacred pledges,
from which I would not escape even if I could."

As he then paused for a reply, she was obliged to say something.

"I hope