'
'James!'
'Well, to cut a long story short, I may say that she secretly
married me, in spite of your lordship's prohibition, about three
months ago. And I must add that, though she cooled down rather
quickly, everything went on smoothly enough between us for some
time; in spite of the awkwardness of meeting only by stealth. We
were only waiting for a convenient moment to break the news to you
when this idle Adonis turned up, and after poisoning her mind
against me, brought her into this disgrace.'
Here the operatic luminary, who had sat in rather an abstracted and
nerveless attitude till the cousin made his declaration, fired up
and cried: 'I declare before Heaven that till this moment I never
knew she was a wife! I found her in her father's house an unhappy
girl--unhappy, as I believe, because of the loneliness and
dreariness of that establishment, and the want of society, and for
nothing else whatever. What this statement about her being your
wife means I am quite at a loss to understand. Are you indeed
married to him, Laura?'
Laura nodded from within her tearful handkerchief. 'It was because
of my anomalous position in being privately married to him,' she
sobbed, 'that I was unhappy at home--and--and I didn't like him so
well as I did at first--and I wished I could get out of the mess I
was in! And then I saw you a few times, and when you said, "We'll
run off," I thought I saw a way out of it all, and then I agreed to
come with you--oo-oo!'
'Well! well! well! And is this true?' murmured the bewildered old
nobleman, staring from James to Laura, and from Laura to James, as
if he fancied they might be figments of the imagination.
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