“No man could say more than that, Miss Halcombe. As to my experience, few men in his situation would have said as much.”
She paused after I had spoken those words, and looked at me with a singular expression of perplexity and distress.
“I accuse nobody, and I suspect nothing,” she broke out abruptly. “But I cannot and will not accept the responsibility of persuading Laura to this marriage.”
“That is exactly the course which Sir Percival Glyde has himself requested you to take,” I replied in astonishment. “He has begged you not to force her inclinations.”
“And he indirectly obliges me to force them, if I give her his message.”
“How can that possibly be?”
“Consult your own knowledge of Laura, Mr. Gilmore. If I tell her to reflect on the circumstances of her engagement, I at once appeal to two of the strongest feelings in her nature—to her love for her father’s memory, and to her strict regard for truth. You know that she never broke a promise in her life—you know that she entered on this engagement at the beginning of her father’s fatal illness, and that he spoke hopefully and happily of her marriage to Sir Percival Glyde on his deathbed.”
I own that I was a little shocked at this view of the case.
“Surely,” I said, “you don’t mean to infer that when Sir Percival spoke to you yesterday he speculated on such a result as you have just mentioned?”
Her frank, fearless face answered for her before she spoke.