ding the
world, laying it to his charge that her garden had become a place of
nettles, her horizon an unlighted fourth side of a square.

Clara passed from person to person visiting the Hall. There was
universal, and as she was compelled to see, honest admiration of the
host. Not a soul had a suspicion of his cloaked nature. Her agony of
hypocrisy in accepting their compliments as the bride of Sir Willoughby
Patterne was poorly moderated by contempt of them for their
infatuation. She tried to cheat herself with the thought that they were
right and that she was the foolish and wicked inconstant. In her
anxiety to strangle the rebelliousness which had been communicated from
her mind to her blood, and was present with her whether her mind was in
action or not, she encouraged the ladies Eleanor and Isabel to magnify
the fictitious man of their idolatry, hoping that she might enter into
them imaginatively, that she might to some degree subdue herself to the
necessity of her position. If she partly succeeded in stupefying her
antagonism, five minutes of him undid the work.

He requested her to wear the Patterne pearls for a dinner-party of
grand ladies, telling her that he would commission Miss Isabel to take
them to her. Clara begged leave to decline them, on the plea of having
no right to wear them. He laughed at her modish modesty. "But really
it might almost be classed with affectation," said he. "I give you the
right. Virtually you are my wife."

"No."

"Before heaven?"

"No. We are not married."

"As my betrothed, will you wear them, to please me?"

"I would rather not. I cannot wear borrowed jewels. These I cannot
wear. Forgive me, I cannot. And, Willoughby," she said, scorning
herself for want of fortitude in not keeping to the simply blunt
provocative refusal, "does one not look like a victim decked for the
sacrifice?--the garlanded heifer you see on Greek vases, in that array
of jewellery?"

"My dear Clara!" exclaimed the astonished lover, "how can you term them
borrowed, when they are the Patterne jewels, our family heirloom
pearls, unmatched, I venture to affirm, decidedly in my county and many
others, and passing to the use of the mistress of the house in the
natural course of things?"

"They are yours, they are not mine."

"Prospectively they are yours."

"It would be to anticipate the fact to wear them."

"With my consent, my approval? at my request?"

"I am not yet . . . I never may be . . ."