was so new, so pretty, at once so womanly and so childish, that it won her completely. And when Bella said again, “Do you think you could, Lizzie?” with her eyebrows raised, her head inquiringly on one side, and an odd doubt about it in her own bosom, Lizzie showed beyond all question that she thought she could.
“Tell me, my dear,” said Bella, “what is the matter, and why you live like this.”
Lizzie presently began, by way of prelude, “You must have many lovers —” when Bella checked her with a little scream of astonishment.
“My dear, I haven’t one!”
“Not one?”
“Well! Perhaps one,” said Bella. “I am sure I don’t know. I had one, but what he may think about it at the present time I can’t say. Perhaps I have half a one (of course I don’t count that Idiot, George Sampson). However, never mind me. I want to hear about you.”
“There is a certain man,” said Lizzie, “a passionate and angry man, who says he loves me, and who I must believe does love me. He is the friend of my brother. I shrank from him within myself when my brother first brought him to me; but the last time I saw him he terrified me more than I can say.” There she stopped.
“Did you come here to escape from him, Lizzie?”
“I came here immediately after he so alarmed me.”
“Are you afraid of him here?”
“I am not timid generally, but I am always afraid of him. I am afraid to see a newspaper, or to hear a word spoken of what is done in London, lest he should have done some violence.”
“Then you are not afraid of him for yourself, dear?” said Bella, after pondering on the words.
“I should be even that, if I met him about here. I look round for him always, as I pass to and fro at night.”
“Are you afraid of anything he may do to himself in London, my dear?”
“No. He might be fierce enough even to do some violence to himself, but I don’t think of that.”
“Then it would almost seem, dear,” said Bella quaintly, “as if there must be somebody else?”
Lizzie put her hands before her face for a moment before replying: “The words are always in my ears, and the blow he struck upon a stone wall as he said them is always before my eyes. I have tried hard to think it not worth remembering, but I cannot make so little of it. His hand was trickling down with blood as he said to me, ‘Then I hope that I may never kill him!”’
Rather startled, Bella made and clasped a girdle of her arms round Lizzie’s waist, and then asked quietly, in a soft voice, as they both looked at the fire:
“Kill him! Is this man so jealous, then?”
“Of a gentleman,” said Lizzie. “ — I hardly know how to tell you — of a gentleman far above me and my way of life, who broke father’s death to me, and has shown an interest in me since.”
“Does he love you?”