" With those
words he rose from his chair, and advanced a few steps towards the
place where she was sitting.
She started violently, and a faint cry of surprise escaped her.
Every word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and
truth to a man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a
pure and true woman. Her own noble conduct had been the hidden
enemy, throughout, of all the hopes she had trusted to it. I had
dreaded this from the first. I would have prevented it, if she
had allowed me the smallest chance of doing so. I even waited and
watched now, when the harm was done, for a word from Sir Percival
that would give me the opportunity of putting him in the wrong.
"You have left it to ME, Miss Fairlie, to resign you," he
continued. "I am not heartless enough to resign a woman who has
just shown herself to be the noblest of her sex."
He spoke with such warmth and feeling, with such passionate
enthusiasm, and yet with such perfect delicacy, that she raised
her head, flushed up a little, and looked at him with sudden
animation and spirit.
"No!" she said firmly. "The most wretched of her sex, if she must
give herself in marriage when she cannot give her love.
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