Page:The Last Chronicle of Barset Vol 2.djvu/97

Rh "Of course it is very wrong; I know that."

"I'm not speaking of myself, now. I have learned to think so little of myself, as even to be indifferent to the feeling of the injury you are doing me. My life is a blank, and I almost think that nothing can hurt me further. I have not heart left enough to break; no, not enough to be broken. It is not of myself that I am thinking, when I ask you how you dare to address me in such language. Do you not know that it is an injury to another?"

"To what other?" asked Conway Dalrymple, whose mind was becoming rather confused, and who was not quite sure whether the other one was Mr. Dobbs Broughton, or somebody else.

"To that poor girl who is coming here now, who is devoted to you, and to whom, I do not doubt, you have uttered words which ought to have made it impossible for you to speak to me as you spoke not a moment since."

Things were becoming very grave and difficult. They would have been very grave, indeed, had not some god saved him by sending Miss Van Siever to his rescue at this moment. He was beginning to think what he would say in answer to the accusation now made, when his eager ear caught the sound of her step upon the stairs; and before the pause in the conversation which the circumstances admitted had given place to the necessity for further speech, Miss Van Siever had knocked at the door and had entered the room. He was rejoiced, and I think that Mrs. Broughton did not regret the interference. It is always well that these little dangerous scenes should be brought to sudden ends. The last details of such romances, if drawn out to their natural conclusions, are apt to be uncomfortable, if not dull. She did not want him to go down on his knees, knowing that the getting up again is always awkward.

"Clara, I began to think you were never coming," said Mrs. Broughton, with her sweetest smile.

"I began to think so myself also," said Clara. "And I believe this must be the last sitting, or, at any rate, the last but one."

"Is anything the matter at home?" said Mrs. Broughton, clasping her hands together.

"Nothing very much; mamma asked me a question or two this morning, and I said I was coming here. Had she asked me why, I should have told her."

"But what did she ask? What did she say?"

"She does not always make herself very intelligible. She complains without telling you what she complains of. But she muttered