"I'm not. I ought at least to see her and tell her my discovery."
Jessie suddenly rose. "I _hate_ that woman!" she cried, sharply. And, at the same instant, Lance saw his engagement ring flashing upon her finger.
"You shall not hate her," he declared, with passion. "She is your kinswoman--one of us. It isn't right that you should say that, and I won't endure it."
"Never mind whether you will endure it or not," Jessie retorted. "She has occupied enough of your attention already."
"My dear child," Lance remonstrated, "it's impossible that you should be jealous of that girl! But what else can you mean? What do you demand?"
"I think that you ought to just drop her, from this time on," said Jessie, closing her lips decisively.
There are scientific thinkers who tell us that the will is not a cause, but merely a state of consciousness resulting from previous conditions of the nerves and the emotions. However this may be, Lance's will asserted itself in strong opposition to Jessie's. The probability that Adela was a lineal descendant of Gertrude Wylde appealed strongly to his imagination. Now that his theory seemed so well established, he was resolved to have her kinship acknowledged; and, further, he experienced a strong attraction toward her, the stress of which he did not fully comprehend. He himself represented the man who had loved Gertrude, who had vainly searched for and lost her. Was it not fair that he should have some hand in the destiny of the girl thus reclaimed, after the lapse of centuries, from the oblivion which had overtaken Gertrude's life?
"I will not drop her," he said, unyieldingly. "And, what's more, Jessie, I am going to see her, and shall stand by her."
Exactly what was to be the issue of Lance's sentiment respecting Adela, it would have been hard to say. No fatal breach had as yet been made in his relations with Jessie; yet they parted, after the difference which I have just detailed, with a coldness that promised ill; and, for the first time, Lance met the issue that had for weeks past unobtrusively put itself in his way. If Jessie would persist in being so narrow, so unsympathetic, what was to come? And if any trouble from this source should divide them, what was there left to him? Facing this alternative, Lance was forced to perceive that the interest which he had allowed himself to feel in Adela had, unawares, grown into a dangerous emotion. In one way it seemed absurd. In another, it was tragical. Did he actually, in view of the rupture which now seemed likely to occur between himself and Jessie, contemplate such a possibility as giving his life up to Adela? If he were to do that, the question of treachery to his humble friend, Dennis De Vine, would be involved. Nevertheless, some unseen power seemed to propel him toward an erratic solution of this sort. He wondered whether at last the yearning of his ancestor, long ago, was fated to meet fulfilment by his own union with the latest offspring of Gertrude Wylde. No! he would not think of it: he refused to surrender himself to such fantasies. And still he could not escape their importuning.