"Run home!" he said again.
"And--and--you won't--won't--tell--Scott?" she whispered through her
tears.
"But I don't think even I am such a bounder as that!" he said gently. "Do
you?"
She lifted her face impulsively. She kissed him with quivering lips.
"No--no. I didn't mean it. Good-bye Oh, good-bye!"
He kissed her in return. "Good-bye!" he said.
And so they parted.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FURNACE
The bridal dress with its filmy veil still lay in its white box--a fairy
garment that had survived the catastrophe. Dinah sat and looked at it
dully. The light of her single candle shimmered upon the soft folds. How
beautiful it was!
She had been sitting there for hours, after a terrible scene with her
mother downstairs, and from acute distress she had passed into a state of
torpid misery that enveloped her like a black cloud. She felt almost too
exhausted, too numbed, to think. Her thoughts wandered drearily back and
forth. She was sure she had been very greatly to blame, yet she could not
fix upon any definite juncture at which she had begun to go wrong. Her
engagement had been such a whirlwind of Fate. She had been carried off
her feet from the very beginning. And the deliverance from the home
bondage had seemed so fair a prospect. Now she was plunged, back again
into that bondage, and she was firmly convinced that no chance of freedom
would ever be offered to her again.
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