The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe, in Extracts from Her Diary

She put her arms round my neck, and rested her head quietly on my bosom. On the opposite wall hung the miniature portrait of her father. I bent over her, and saw that she was looking at it while her head lay on my breast. “I can never claim my release from my engagement,” she went on. “Whatever way it ends it must end wretchedly for me . All I can do, Marian, is not to add the remembrance that I have broken my promise and forgotten my father’s dying words, to make that wretchedness worse.” “What is it you propose, then?” I asked. “To tell Sir Percival Glyde the truth with my own lips,” she answered, “and to let him release me, if he will, not because I ask him, but because he knows all.” “What do you mean, Laura, by ‘all’? Sir Percival will know enough (he has told me so himself) if he knows that the engagement is opposed to your own wishes.” “Can I tell him that, when the engagement was made for me by my father, with my own consent? I should have kept my promise, not happily, I am afraid, but still contentedly⁠—” she stopped, turned her face to me, and laid her cheek close against mine⁠—“I should have kept my engagement, Marian, if another love had not grown up in my heart, which was not there when I first promised to be Sir Percival’s wife.” “Laura! you will never lower yourself by making a confession to him?”