ough to tell me.
How I did respect you when you dared to speak the truth to me. Men don't
know women, or they would be harder to them."

"I did not mean to be hard to you."

"If you had taken me by the shoulders and shaken me, and have declared
that before God you would, not allow such wickedness, I should have
obeyed you. I know I should." Harry thought of Florence, and could not
bring himself to say that he wished it had been so. "But where would you
have been then, Harry? I was wrong and false and a beast to marry that
man; but I should not, therefore, have been right to marry you and ruin
you. It would have been ruin, you know, and we should simply have been
fools."

"The folly was very pleasant," said he.

"Yes, yes; I will not deny that. But then the wisdom and the prudence
afterward! Oh, Harry, that was not pleasant. That was not pleasant! But
what was I saying? Oh! about the propriety of your being here. It is so
hard to know what is proper. As I have been married, I suppose I may
receive whom I please. Is not that the law?"

"You may receive me, I should think. Your sister is my cousin's wife."
Harry's matter-of-fact argument did as well as anything else, for it
turned her thought at the moment.

"My sister, Harry! If there was nothing to make us friends but our
connection through Sir Hugh Clavering, I do not know that I should be
particularly anxious to see you. How unmanly he has been, and how
cruel."

"Very cruel," said Harry. Then he thought of Archie and Archie's suit.
"But he is willing to change all that now. Hermione asked me the other
day to persuade you to go to Clavering."

"And have you come here to use your eloquence for that purpose? I will
never go to Clavering again, Harry, unless it should be yours and your
wife should offer to receive me. Then I'd pack up for the dear, dull,
solemn old place though I was on the other side of Europe."

"It will never be mine."

"Probably not, and probably, therefore, I shall never be there again.
No; I can forgive an injury, but not an insult--not an insult such as
that. I will not go to Clavering; so, Harry, you may save your
eloquence. Hermione I shall be glad to see whenever she will come to me.
If you can persuade her to that, you will persuade her to a charity."

"She goes nowhere, I think, without his--his--"

"Without his permission. Of course she does not. That, I suppose, is all
as it should be. And he is such a tyrant that he will give