But in Godfrey Wardour love and pride went hand in hand. Not for
a moment would he will to love a girl capable of being
interested, if nothing more, in Tom Helmer. It must be allowed,
however, that it would have been a terrible torture to see Letty
about the place, to pass her on the stair, to come upon her in
the garden, to sit with her in the room, and know all the time
that it was the test of Tom's worth and her constancy. Even were
she to give up Tom, satisfied that she did not love him, she
could be nothing more to him, even in the relation in which he
had allowed her to think she stood to him. She had behaved too
deceitfully, too heartlessly, too ungratefully, too
_vulgarly_ for that! Yet was his heart torn every time the
vision of the gentle girl rose before "that inward eye," which,
for long, could no more be to him "the bliss of solitude"; when
he saw those hazel depths looking half anxious, half sorrowful in
his face, as, with sadly comic sense of her stupidity, she
listened while he explained or read something he loved. But no;
nothing else would do than act the mere honest guardian,
compelling them to marry, no matter how slight or transient the
shadow the man had cast over her reputation!
Mary returned with a sense of utter failure.
But before long she came to the conclusion that all was right
between Tom and Letty, and that the cause of her anxiety had lain
merely in Letty's loss of animal spirits.
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