With the utmost candour, and without the least reservation, he told the humbleness of his origin, the blemish in his birth, his wretched bringing-up, and withal, the mysterious matter of his glorious vision. The assertion that the moment he beheld her, on rescuing her from the robber, he identified her face and figure with the lady of his dream, called forth her deepest blushes, and she audibly whispered “Incredible!” His repeated assertions, passionately urged, of the truth of his assertion, silenced and perhaps convinced her.
Certain it is that, like the gentle Desdemona, “She gave him for his pains a world of sighs;” and time evinced to him that the lady had a tale to tell also, which proved that although highly born, and affluent as she was, her lot had not been entire sunshine.
“I am yet hardly twenty-one,” replied she, “although I have been twice married. To neither of these husbands have I been able to give my entire heart. My first union was at my father’s _command_, when solicitations proved useless, to his contemporary and old schoolfellow, who was old-fashioned enough to restore the long-exploded _abs_ in his name, vaunting himself as Thomas ab Rhys ab Thomas Gock, of Ystrad Feen; who could carry on the antique and rusty chain of _abs_, without a broken link, through several centuries up to the patriarch of his tribe, Elystan Glodrydd.
“Poor old gentleman! I fed him with a pap-spoon, in his large gothic arm-chair, when a stroke of paralysis had withered his right hand; but in six months after our marriage (marriage!) he fell a victim to his ruling passion, which I will not name to his disparagement, and died of apoplexy. My year’s mourning for him had barely expired, when my mother claimed her right of choosing my next husband; and, in the course of time, poor Sir George (peace to the memory of a harmless man!) became my second husband. Had I lived to these days unwedded,” said she, with a look and tone of resolute firmness, almost foreign to her usual gentleness, “it is more than probable that I should not have become the victim of either of my parents’ whims.”
“My poor mother has been long deceased; but well I know my father’s future aim respecting me—to have me united to some other choice of his own; but no! the sapling may bend to the storm, but, springing up again, who shall re-bend the youthful oak that time matures? If my good father inclines to play the tyrant with me, he will find some difference between the woman and the child.” Applauding her resolution, Twm, kissed her hand with rapture; and, she added in a tone of gaiety, “if ever I change my state, I shall become the votary of a different shrine to any that I have yet bowed to;”