"Oh, Clarence! she was fascinated by the rank and splendor and personal attractions of the young duke! Her fancy, vanity, ambition and imagination were fired; but her heart was never touched! She had not seen Rothsay for so long a time that his image had somewhat faded in her memory when this splendid young fellow crossed her path and dazzled her for a time! It was a brief madness--nothing more! But you can see for yourself how really she loved Rothsay when you see that anxiety for his fate is breaking her heart."
"I see, mother dear; but I don't understand! And I don't know what on earth we can do for her! If my father does not think proper to suggest something, we must not, for if we should do so it would make matters much worse."
"Yes," sighed the old lady; and the subject was dropped.
Clarence had said that he did not understand Cora's state of mind. No; nor did old Mrs. Rockharrt. How could they, when Cora had not understood herself, until suffering brought self-knowledge?
From her childhood up she had loved Rule Rothsay as a sister loves a favorite brother. In her girlhood, knowing no stronger love, on the strength of this she accepted the offered hand of Rothsay, and was engaged to be married to him. She meant to have been faithful to him; but it was a long engagement, during which she traveled with her grandparents for three years, while the memory of her calmly loved betrothed husband grew rather dim. Then came her meeting with the handsome and accomplished young Duke of Cumbervale, and the infatuation, the hallucination that enslaved her imagination for a period. Then began the mental conflict between inclination and duty, ending in her resolution to forget her English lover and to be true to Rule.
Up to the very wedding day she had suppressed and controlled her feelings with heroic firmness, but on the evening of that day, while waiting for her husband, the long, severe tension of her nerves utterly gave way, and when found in a paroxysm of tears and questioned by him, in her wretchedness and misery she had confessed the infidelity of her heart and pleaded for time to conquer it.
She had expected bitter reproaches, but there were none. She had dreaded fierce anger, but there was none. She had anticipated obduracy, but there was none. There was nothing but intense suffering, divine compassion, and infinite renunciation. He pitied her. He soothed her. He defended her from the reproaches of her own conscience. He protected her by an imposed provision that for her own sake she should not tell others what she had told him. And then--