'It must, I tell you!' repeated Caroline. 'If it had all to begin over again, it would be very different. O, if it was but this time last year!'
'But Caroline, Caroline,' repeated Marian, carried away by the thought that rose to her lips, 'only think; you say now if it was this time last year--now, while you can escape. Shall not you say so all the more when it is really too late,--when you will wish you had drawn back now?'
'You have no right to say I should wish, that!' said Caroline, offended. 'You don't know what the love is that you are holding so cheaply.'
'I beg your pardon, Caroline,' and Marian was thrown into herself again; but she thought a little longer, and seeing that Caroline was still waiting and musing, she ventured on saying, in a timid voice, 'Somehow, I think, it would seem to me that the more affection there was, the more painful it would all be.'
'You are right there, Marian,' exclaimed Caroline, in a voice of acute feeling.
It was a strange question that Marian next asked abruptly, on an impulse sudden at the moment, though it was what she had long eagerly desired to know. 'Do you love him after all?'
Caroline did not seem vexed by the inquiry, but went on speaking rather as if she was examining herself as to the answer,--'Love him? I don't know; sometimes I think I do, sometimes I think not. It is not as people in books love, and--and it can't be as your Agnes must love Mr. Arundel.'
A most emphatic 'O no!' escaped from Marian, she hardly knew how, as if it was profanation to compare Mr. Faulkner to Edmund; and perhaps the strongest proof that Caroline's was not a real attachment, was that she let it pass. 'But then,' pursued she warmly, 'I am sure he is attached to me--yes, very much--and--well, and I am glad to see him come into the room; I like to walk with him. There is no one--no--no one in the whole world whom I like so well. All my doubts and fears go away at the first sound of his voice, and I am quite happy then. O, Marian, that surely is love?'
'I don't know,' said Marian; 'I can't fancy love that has not begun with esteem, with looking up,'
'I do look up!' said Caroline, eagerly. 'He is so clever, so sensible, has such a mind.'
'I did not mean looking up intellectually,'
'Ah! you can live in that way,' said Caroline, quickly; 'your own people are all of _that sort_. But you know I should never have had any one at all to love, if I had begun looking for _that kind of thing_, even at home.'
Too true, thought Marian, while she answered, 'It is a different thing where you have to begin afresh, and take it voluntarily upon you.'
'Voluntarily!' repeated Caroline; 'I am sure my will had very little to do with it. I found myself in the midst of it, without knowing how, before I had made up my mind one way or the other. O, Marian! if you had but been with me that morning.'
'Would that have prevented you?'
'I do really believe it would. You would have looked as if you thought it so impossible, that I should have been strengthened up to do something they could not have taken for consent. I'll tell you all about it, Marian, from the beginning, and you will see how little free will I had in it, and how distracted I am now.'
Caroline went through the whole story, incoherently, and often only half expressing her sentiments, and passing over what Marian knew already. It seemed that she had been pleased with Mr. Faulkner's agreeableness, flattered by his attention, and entered upon the same sort of intercourse with him as with any other pleasant acquaintance. It would never have been her way, brought up as she had been, to shrink from him with such shuddering aversion as Marian did, simply from what she had heard of his opinions. He was so agreeable, that it was just as well quite to forget that, or only half to believe it. Then came the growing perceptions of his intentions towards her, and of her mother's triumph in them. But this was not till the archery arrangements were so far advanced, that she could not have drawn back from them; and she was,
