Page:In the Roar of the Sea.djvu/241

Rh He uttered an oath, and with his hands clenched the upper stone of the tomb.

"I have promised my aunt that I will accept you, if you will suffer my poor brother to live where I live, and suffer me to be his protector. He is helpless and must have someone to think and watch for him. My aunt would have sent him to Mr. Obadiah Scantlebray's asylum, and that would have been fatal to him. To save him from that I said that I would be yours, on the condition that my home should be his home. I have passed my word to my aunt, and I will not go from it, but that does not mean that I have changed my belief that we are unfitted for each other, because we belong to different orders of being."

"This is cold comfort."

"It is cold as ice, but it is all that I have to give to you. I wish to put everything plainly before you now, that there may be no misapprehension later, and you may be asking of me what I cannot give, and be angry at not receiving what I never promised to surrender."

"So! I am only accepted for the sake of that boy, Jamie."

"It is painful for me to say what I do—as painful as it must be for you to hear it, but I cannot help myself. I wish to put all boldly and hardly before you before an irrevocable step is taken such as might make us both wretched. I take you for Jamie's sake. Were his happiness, his well-being not in the scale, I would not take you. I would remain free."

"That is plain enough," exclaimed Coppinger, setting his teeth, and he broke off a piece of the tombstone on which he was half sitting.

"You will ask of me love, honor, and obedience. I will do my best to love you—like you I do now, for you have been kind and good to me, and I can never forget what you have done for me. But it is a long leap from liking to loving, still I will try my best, and if I fail it will not be for lack of effort. Honor is another matter. That lies in your own power to give. If you behave as a good and worthy man to your fellows, and justly toward me, of course I shall honor you. I must honor what is deserving of honor, and where I honor there I may come to love. I cannot love where I do not honor, so perhaps I may say that my heart is in your hands, and that if