Lady Janet's family is an old family—on her side only."
Mercy dropped her embroidery, and looked Horace full in the face.
She, too, attached no common importance to what she had next to say.
"If I had not been connected with Lady Janet," she began, "would you ever have thought of marrying me?"
"My love! what is the use of asking?
You are connected with Lady Janet."
She refused to let him escape answering her in that way.
"Suppose I had not been connected with Lady Janet?" she persisted.
"Suppose I had only been a good girl, with nothing but my own merits to speak for me.
What would your mother have said then?"
Horace still parried the question—only to find the point of it pressed home on him once more.
"Why do you ask?" he said.
"I ask to be answered," she rejoined.
"Would your mother have liked you to marry a poor girl, of no family—with nothing but her own virtues to speak for her?"
Horace was fairly pressed back to the wall.
"If you must know," he replied, "my mother would have refused to sanction such a marriage as that."
"No matter how good the girl might have been?"
There was something defiant—almost threatening—in her tone.
Horace was annoyed—and he showed it when he spoke.
"My mother would have respected the girl, without ceasing to respect herself," he said.
"My mother would have remembered what was due to the family name."
"And she would have said, No?"
"She would have said, No."
"Ah!"
There was an undertone of angry contempt in the exclamation which made Horace start.
"What is the matter?" he asked.
"Nothing," she answered, and took up her embroidery again.
There he sat at her side, anxiously looking at her—his hope in the future centered in his marriage!
In a week more, if she chose, she might enter that ancient family of which he had spoken so proudly, as his wife.
"Oh!" she thought, "if I didn't love him! if I had only his merciless mother to think of!"
Uneasily conscious of some estrangement between them, Horace spoke again.
"Surely I have not offended you?" he said.
She turned toward him once more.
The work dropped unheeded on her lap.
Her grand eyes softened into tenderness.
A smile trembled sadly on her delicate lips.
She laid one hand caressingly on his shoulder.
All the beauty of her voice lent its charm to the next words that she said to him.
The woman's heart hungered in its misery for the comfort that could only come from his lips.
"You would have loved me, Horace—without stopping to think of the family name?"
The family name again!
How strangely she persisted in coming back to that!
Horace looked at her without answering, trying vainly to fathom what was passing in her mind.
She took his hand, and wrung it hard—as if she would wring the answer out of him in that way.
"You would have loved me?" she repeated.
The double spell of her voice and her touch was on him.
He answered, warmly,
"Under any circumstances! under any name!"
She put one arm round his neck, and fixed her eyes on his.
"Is that true?" she asked.