“I suppose you know how we are to be married?” he asked.  “All I can say is—­I don’t.”

“You do!” she retorted.  “You know that we are in Scotland.  You know that there are neither forms, ceremonies, nor delays in marriage, here.  The plan I have proposed to you secures my being received at the inn, and makes it easy and natural for you to join me there afterward.  The rest is in our own hands.  A man and a woman who wish to be married (in Scotland) have only to secure the necessary witnesses and the thing is done.  If the landlady chooses to resent the deception practiced on her, after that, the landlady may do as she pleases.  We shall have gained our object in spite of her—­and, what is more, we shall have gained it without risk to you.”

“Don’t lay it all on my shoulders,” Geoffrey rejoined.  “You women go headlong at every thing.  Say we are married.  We must separate afterward—­or how are we to keep it a secret?”

“Certainly.  You will go back, of course, to your brother’s house, as if nothing had happened.”

“And what is to become of you?”

“I shall go to London.”

“What are you to do in London?”

“Haven’t I already told you that I have thought of every thing?  When I get to London I shall apply to some of my mother’s old friends—­friends of hers in the time when she was a musician.  Every body tells me I have a voice—­if I had only cultivated it.  I will cultivate it!  I can live, and live respectably, as a concert singer.  I have saved money enough to support me, while I am learning—­and my mother’s friends will help me, for her sake.”

So, in the new life that she was marking out, was she now unconsciously reflecting in herself the life of her mother before her.  Here was the mother’s career as a public singer, chosen (in spite of all efforts to prevent it) by the child!  Here (though with other motives, and under other circumstances) was the mother’s irregular marriage in Ireland, on the point of being followed by the daughter’s irregular marriage in Scotland!  And here, stranger still, was the man who was answerable for it—­the son of the man who had found the flaw in the Irish marriage, and had shown the way by which her mother was thrown on the world!  “My Anne is my second self.  She is not called by her father’s name; she is called by mine.  She is Anne Silvester as I was.  Will she end like Me?”—­The answer to those words—­the last words that had trembled on the dying mother’s lips—­was coming fast.  Through the chances and changes of many years, the future was pressing near—­and Anne Silvester stood on the brink of it.

“Well?” she resumed.  “Are you at the end of your objections?  Can you give me a plain answer at last?”

No!  He had another objection ready as the words passed her lips.

“Suppose the witnesses at the inn happen to know me?” he said.  “Suppose it comes to my father’s ears in that way?”