“They told you false!” exclaimed Lord Sherbrooke, wildly and vehemently—­“whoever said so, lied.  I have been culpable, and am culpable, Caroline; but not to that extent.  I never dreamed of wedding her.  Did I not know it could not be?  But you speak of your resolutions.  Let me know what they are at once!  To declare all, I suppose!  Publicly to produce the proofs of our marriage!  To announce to my father, already exasperated against me, that in this, too, I have offended him!  To call down, even upon your own head, the revenge of a man who has never yet, in life, gone without it!  To tell all—­all, in short?”

“No, no, no, Sherbrooke!” she said—­“I am going to do none of all these things.  Angry and thwarted, you do not do that justice to your wife which you ought.  You speak, Sherbrooke, as if you did not know me.  I will do none of these things.  You do not choose to acknowledge me as your wife.  You are angry at my having come to England.  I will not announce our marriage till the last moment.  I will not publish it till my dying hour, unless I be driven to it by some terrible circumstance.  I will return to France.  I will live as the widow of a man that I have loved.  But I will never see you more, Sherbrooke; I will never hear from you more; I will never write to you more; till you come openly and straightforwardly to claim me as your wife in the face of all the world.  Whenever you declare me to be your wife, I will do all the duties of a wife:  I will be obedient to your will, not alone from duty but from love; but till you do acknowledge me as your wife, you can plead no title to such submission.”

“Ah, Caroline,” replied Lord Sherbrooke, “you speak well and wisely, but coldly too.  You can easily resign the man that you once loved.  It costs you but little to give him over to his own course; to afford him no solace, no consolation, no advice; to deprive him of that communication, which, distant as it was, might have saved him from many an error.  It costs you nothing to pronounce such words as you have spoken, and to sever our fate for ever.”

“It is you that sever it,” she replied, in a sad and reproachful tone.  “Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, you do me wrong—­you know you do me wrong—­Oh, how great wrong!  Do you think I have shed no tears?  Do you think my heart has not been wrung?  Do you think my hours have not passed in anguish, my days in sadness, and my nights in weeping?  Oh, Sherbrooke, since you left me, what has been my fate?  To watch for some weeks the death-bed of a father, from whose mind the light had already departed; to sorrow over his tomb; to watch the long days for the coming of my husband—­of the husband whom all had doubted, all had condemned, but my own weak heart, whose vows of amendment I had believed, to whose entreaties I had yielded, even to that rashest of all acts, a secret marriage; to find him delay his coming from day to day, and to see the sun that rose upon me in solitary