“Provoking old man! Do you think you should have persuaded him to give up the letters, if you had had more time?”

“I don’t know. I wish Mr. Sheepshanks hadn’t come up just then. I didn’t like his finding me standing talking to Mr. Preston.”

“Oh! I dare say he’d never think anything about it. What did he—Mr. Preston—say?”

“He seemed to think you were fully engaged to him, and that these letters were the only proof he had. I think he loves you in his way.”

“His way, indeed!” said Cynthia scornfully.

“The more I think of it, the more I see it would be better for papa to speak to him. I did say I would tell it all to Lady Harriet, and get Lord Cumnor to make him give up the letters. But it would be very awkward.”

“Very!” said Cynthia gloomily. “But he would see it was only a threat.”

“But I will do it in a moment, if you like. I meant what I said; only I feel that papa would manage it best of all, and more privately.”

“I’ll tell you what, Molly—you’re bound by promise, you know, and cannot tell Mr. Gibson without breaking your solemn word—but it’s just this: I’ll leave Hollingford and never come back again, if ever your father hears of this affair; there!” Cynthia stood up now, and began to fold up Molly’s shawl, in her nervous excitement.

“Oh, Cynthia—Roger!” was all that Molly said.

“Yes, I know! you need not remind me of him. But I’m not going to live in the house with any one who may be always casting up in his mind the things he has heard against me—things—faults, perhaps—which sound so much worse than they really are. I was so happy, when I first came here; you all liked me, and admired me, and thought well of me, and now—— Why, Molly, I can see the difference in you already. You carry your thoughts in your face—I have read them there these two days—you’ve been thinking, ‘How Cynthia must have deceived me; keeping up a correspondence all this time—having half- engagements to two men!’ You’ve been more full of that, than of pity for me as a girl who has always been obliged to manage for herself, without any friend to help her and protect her.”

Molly was silent. There was a great deal of truth in what Cynthia was saying: and yet a great deal of falsehood. For, through all this long forty-eight hours, Molly had loved Cynthia dearly, and had been more weighed down by the position the latter was in than Cynthia herself. She also knew—but this was a second thought following on the other—that she had suffered much pain in trying to do her best in this interview with Mr. Preston. She had been tried beyond her strength: and the great tears welled up into her eyes, and fell slowly down her cheeks.

“Oh! what a brute I am!” said Cynthia, kissing them away. “I see—I know it is the truth, and I deserve it—but I need not reproach you.”

“You did not reproach me!” said Molly, trying to smile. “I have thought something of what you said—but I do love you dearly—dearly, Cynthia—I should have done just the same as you did.”

“No, you would not. Your grain is different, somehow.”