There was too much colour in her cheeks, too much energy in her manner, too much firmness in her voice.  The little book of Hartright’s drawings—­the fatal book that she will dream over whenever she is alone—­was in one of her hands.  I began by gently and firmly taking it from her, and putting it out of sight on a side-table.

“Tell me quietly, my darling, what you wish to do,” I said.  “Has Mr. Gilmore been advising you?”

She shook her head.  “No, not in what I am thinking of now.  He was very kind and good to me, Marian, and I am ashamed to say I distressed him by crying.  I am miserably helpless—­I can’t control myself.  For my own sake, and for all our sakes, I must have courage enough to end it.”

“Do you mean courage enough to claim your release?” I asked.

“No,” she said simply.  “Courage, dear, to tell the truth.”

She put her arms round my neck, and rested her head quietly on my bosom.  On the opposite wall hung the miniature portrait of her father.  I bent over her, and saw that she was looking at it while her head lay on my breast.

“I can never claim my release from my engagement,” she went on.  “Whatever way it ends it must end wretchedly for me.  All I can do, Marian, is not to add the remembrance that I have broken my promise and forgotten my father’s dying words, to make that wretchedness worse.”

“What is it you propose, then?” I asked.

“To tell Sir Percival Glyde the truth with my own lips,” she answered, “and to let him release me, if he will, not because I ask him, but because he knows all.”

“What do you mean, Laura, by ‘all’?  Sir Percival will know enough (he has told me so himself) if he knows that the engagement is opposed to your own wishes.”

“Can I tell him that, when the engagement was made for me by my father, with my own consent?  I should have kept my promise, not happily, I am afraid, but still contentedly—­” she stopped, turned her face to me, and laid her cheek close against mine—­“I should have kept my engagement, Marian, if another love had not grown up in my heart, which was not there when I first promised to be Sir Percival’s wife.”

“Laura! you will never lower yourself by making a confession to him?”

“I shall lower myself, indeed, if I gain my release by hiding from him what he has a right to know.”

“He has not the shadow of a right to know it!”

“Wrong, Marian, wrong!  I ought to deceive no one—­least of all the man to whom my father gave me, and to whom I gave myself.”  She put her lips to mine, and kissed me.  “My own love,” she said softly, “you are so much too fond of me, and so much too proud of me, that you forget, in my case, what you would remember in your own.  Better that Sir Percival should doubt my motives, and misjudge my conduct if he will, than that I should be first false to him in thought, and then mean enough to serve my own interests by hiding the falsehood.”