Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/243

 fancy that, if they can achieve a great match, they will be happy, and the rest will come by the light of nature. Goodness me, have we not seen that tragically disproved with Ruth Brackenbury and Kathleen Spenworth? Will and this girl had nothing in common. If she married him, it would be over my dead body. . . If she did not see this, at least she saw that she was making no impression on my boy; and then I am sadly afraid that she deliberately laid herself out to tempt him. I have seen enough of life to know that, when a woman abandons herself to this kind of thing, very few even of the purest and best are proof against her wiles. This Molly had made up her mind to get a hold on Will; and, once she had decided on that, she would stop at nothing.

I never knew a thing at the time. When my boy suddenly arrived in London, when the mad clergyman followed him and insisted on seeing Arthur, I thought that she would content herself with making him compromise her. If they could be discovered kissing. . . as they were. . . And that was all that even her father was allowed to know at the time, though she talked about a promise of marriage. But she was clever enough to know that she couldn’t make a man marry her because he had kissed her. ..

So far as I can see, there is no doubt at