“I wish I could.”

“You can.  Marry me:  then your relation to that man will seem but a hideous dream.  I shall be able to say, looking at you, my wife, ’I was faithful:  I suffered something for her; I came home:  she loved me still; the proof is, she was my wife within three months of my return.’”

When he said that to her in the Pleasaunce, if there had been a priest at hand—.  In a word, Josephine longed to show him her love, yet wished not to shock her mother, nor offend her own sense of delicacy; but Camille cared for nothing but his love.  To sacrifice love and happiness, even for a time, to etiquette, seemed to him to be trifling with the substance of great things for the shadow of petty things; and he said so:  sometimes sadly, sometimes almost bitterly.

So Josephine was a beleagured fortress, attacked with one will, and defended by troops, one-third of which were hot on the side of the besiegers.

When singleness attacks division, you know the result beforehand.  Why then should I spin words?  I will not trace so ill-matched a contest step by step, sentence by sentence:  let me rather hasten to relate the one peculiarity that arose out of this trite contest, where, under the names of Camille and Josephine, the two great sexes may be seen acting the whole world-wide distich,—­

     “It’s a man’s part to try,
     And a woman’s to deny [for a while?].”

Finding her own resolutions oozing away, Josephine caught at another person.

She said to Camille before Rose,—­

“Even if I could bring myself to snatch at happiness in this indelicate way—­scarce a month after, oh!” And there ended the lady’s sentence.  In the absence of a legitimate full stop, she put one hand before her lovely face to hide it, and so no more.  But some two minutes after she delivered the rest in the form and with the tone of a distinct remark, “No:  my mother would never consent.”

“Yes, she would if you could be brought to implore her as earnestly as I implore you.”

“Now would she?” asked Josephine, turning quickly to her sister.

“No, never.  Our mother would look with horror on such a proposal.  A daughter of hers to marry within a twelvemonth of her widowhood!”

“There, you see, Camille.”

“And, besides, she loved Raynal so; she has not forgotten him as we have, almost.”

“Ungrateful creature that I am!” sighed Josephine!

“She mourns for him every day.  Often I see her eyes suddenly fill; that is for him.  Josephine’s influence with mamma is very great:  it is double mine:  but if we all went on our knees to her, the doctor and all, she would never consent.”

“There you see, Camille:  and I could not defy my mother, even for you.”

Camille sighed.

“I see everything is against me, even my love:  for that love is too much akin to veneration to propose to you a clandestine marriage.”