"Matthew!" said Olive, passionately, advancing a step nearer her cousin, "you have bid me begone, and I know that there is nothing left for me but to obey. All is over between us. I played for a heavy stake, and I have lost it. I leave you now, never to see you again. I go forth into the world--whither, I neither know nor care. Listen to these my last words--listen, and believe. I would shed my heart's blood for you. Had you died through me, I would have killed myself an hour afterwards. I never loved you more than at this moment. That love I shall carry with me. Nothing can deprive me of it. Time will soften the hardness of your judgment. Then sometimes you may think of me with a touch of the old kindness, and say to yourself, 'Her greatest fault was that she loved me not wisely, but too well.'"
Still keeping her eyes fixed on her cousin, but vouchsafing no glance to any one else, she moved slowly towards the door. She reached the threshold, and there for a moment she paused.
"Farewell, Matthew! farewell for ever!" she said; and her voice had a ring of pathos and despair in it that her hearers never forgot. Then she drew her veil over her face, and the next moment she was gone.
CHAPTER XI. "AND YOU SHALL STILL BE LADY CLARE."
On leaving the library after the scene with Olive Deane, Gerald had whispered to Eleanor: "Don't open the sealed packet till you have seen me again. I shall be in the conservatory half an hour after luncheon."
To the conservatory Eleanor went at the time specified, taking the sealed packet with her, and there she found Gerald awaiting her arrival. There was a bright, happy look in his eyes, such as she had not seen in them since that never-to-be-for-gotten evening when he first took her in his arms and told her that he loved her. He came to meet her as soon as she opened the door, took both her hands in his, kissed her, and led her to a seat where they would be safe from interruption.
Eleanor did not feel at all like a young lady on whom fickle Fortune had been playing one of her strangest practical jokes; she did not feel a bit like the genteel pauper Lady Dudgeon had called her: she felt very, very happy. It was wrong of her to feel so--very wrong; but she could not help it.