Page:The Semi-attached Couple.djvu/192

 There was no answer; she attempted to rise, but sank back, and faintly murmured—"Nothing."

He looked at her for the first time, and was shocked at her ghastly appearance and fixed look of suffering. "Are you ill, Helen?" he said.

"Do not speak to me, I cannot bear any more cruel words. I must go to my own room, I cannot stay here with all these people looking on. Let me go" and again she tried to rise.

"But you must let me assist you: take my arm, Helen."

"No, no; I must be alone."

"You shall be alone, but you cannot go by yourself, Helen. I will leave you when I have seen you safe to your room."

She had not energy to dispute the point: all she felt was a strong desire to be alone, and a certainty that she could not reach her room without assistance. He led her to it, supporting her trembling steps in silence. She disengaged her arm, and, waving her hand to him to leave her, rushed towards the ottoman, and, flinging herself on it, burst into a flood of tears. She sobbed like a child, and with the young passionate resentment of a child whose attempt to "make it up and be friends" has been misrepresented and repulsed. And as no resentment in her own heart was sufficiently powerful to give her any insight into the latent motives of Lord Teviot's violence, terror and helplessness were the chief consequences produced by his inexplicable language, accompanied by a sense of suffering under extreme injustice.

The relief of tears she had never before in her short, sunny life experienced to this extreme degree. She absolutely revelled in them, ignorant that her husband was a witness to her grief, till the sight of her sorrow overpowered him; and as he flung himself down by her side she heard him beseeching her to be calm and to forgive him, and to