"I accept your sacrifice," he said. "You will thank me in the end that I did so. No, I do not release you from your engagement, Elizabeth. You have said that you would keep your word, and I hold you to it."

He drew her to him with his arm, and kissed her cheek with passionate determination. She shrank away, but he would not let her go.

"No," he proceeded, "you are my promised wife, Elizabeth. I have no intention of giving you up for Stretton or anybody else. I love you more than ever now that I see how brave and honest you can be. We will have no more concealments. When we go back to the house we will tell all the world of our engagement. It was the secrecy that worked this mischief."

She wrenched herself away from him with a look of mingled pain and anger. "Percival!" she cried, "do you want to make me hate you?"

"I would rather have hate than indifference," he answered. "And whether you hate me or not, Elizabeth, you shall be my wife before the year is out. I shall not let you go."

CHAPTER XXVII.

PERCIVAL'S OWN WAY.

Percival had his way. He came back to the house looking stern and grim, but with a resolute determination to carry his point. In half-an-hour it was known throughout the whole household that Miss Murray was engaged to be married to young Mr. Heron, and that the marriage would probably take place before Christmas.

Kitty cast a frightened glance at Elizabeth's face when the announcement was made, but gathered little from its expression. A sort of dull apathy had come over the girl--a reaction, perhaps, from the excitement of feeling through which she had lately passed. It gave her no pain when Percival insisted upon demonstrations of affection which were very contrary to her former habits. She allowed him to hold her hand, to kiss her lips, to call her by endearing names, in a way that would ordinarily have roused her indignation. She seemed incapable of resistance to his will. And this passiveness was so unusual with her that it alarmed and irritated Percival by turns.

Anger rather than affection was the motive of his conduct. As he himself had said, he was rather a selfish man, and he would not willingly sacrifice his own happiness unless he was very sure that hers depended upon the sacrifice. He was enraged with the man who had won Elizabeth's love, and believed him to be a scheming adventurer. Neither patience nor tolerance belonged to Percival's character; and although he loved Elizabeth, he was bitterly indignant with her, and not indisposed to punish her for her faithlessness by forcing her to submit to caresses which she neither liked nor returned. If he had any magnanimity in him he deliberately put it on one side; he knew that he was taking a revenge upon her for which she might never forgive him, which was neither delicate nor generous, but he told himself that he had been too much injured to show mercy. It was Elizabeth's own fault if he assumed the airs of a sultan with a favourite slave, instead of kneeling at her feet. So he argued with himself; and yet a little grain of conscience made him feel from time to time that he was wrong, and that he might live to repent what he was doing now.

"We will be married before Christmas, Elizabeth," he said one day, when he had been at Strathleckie nearly a week. He spoke in a tone of cool insistence.

"As you think best," she answered, sadly.

"Would you prefer a later date?"

"Oh, no," said Elizabeth, smiling a little. "It is all the same to me.

'If 'twere done at all, 'twere well done quickly,' you know."

"Do you mean that?"

"Yes."

"Then why delay it at all? Why not next week--next month, at latest?

What is there to wait for?"

They were sitting in the little school-room, or study, as it was called, near the front door--the very room in which Elizabeth had talked with Brian on the night of his arrival at Strathleckie. The remembrance of that conversation prompted her reply.

"Oh, no," she said, in a tone of almost agonised entreaty. "Percival, have a little mercy. Not yet--not yet."

His face hardened: his keen eyes fixed themselves relentlessly upon her white face. He was sitting upon the sofa: she standing by the fireplace with her hands clasped tightly before her. For a minute he looked at her thus, and then he spoke.

"You said just now that it was all the same to you. May I ask what you mean?"

"There is no need to ask me," she said, resolutely, although, her pale lips quivered. "You know what I mean. I will marry you before Christmas, if you like; but not with such--such indecent haste as you propose. Not this month, nor next."

"In December then?"

"Yes."

"You promise? Even if this man--this tutor--should come back?"

"I suppose I have given you a right to doubt me, Percival," she said.

"But I have never broken my word--never! From the first, I only promised to try to love you; and, indeed, I tried."

"Oh, of course, I know that I am not a lovable individual," said Percival, throwing himself back on the cushions with a savage scowl.

She looked up quickly: there was a bitter word upon her tongue, but she refrained from uttering it. The struggle lasted for a moment only; then she went over to him, and laid her hand softly upon his arm.

"Percival, are you always going to be so hard upon me?" she said. "I know you do not easily forgive, and I have wronged you. Can I do more than be sorry for my wrong-doing? I was wrong to object to your wishes.

I will marry you when you like: you shall decide everything for me now!"

His face had been gloomily averted, but he turned and looked at her as she said the last few words, and took both her hands in his.

"I'm not quite such a brute as you think me, Elizabeth," he answered, with some emotion in his voice. "I don't want to make you do what you find painful."

"That is nonsense," she said, more decidedly than he had heard her speak for many days. "The whole matter is very painful to both of us at present. The only alleviation----"

"Well, what is the only alleviation? Why do you hesitate?"

She lifted her serious, clear eyes to his face.

"I hesitated," she said, "because I did not feel sure whether I had the right to speak of it as an alleviation. I meant--the only thing that makes life bearable at all is the trying to do right; and, when one has failed in doing it, to get back to the right path as soon as possible, leaving the sin and misery behind."

He still held her hands, and he looked down at the slender wrists (where the blue veins showed so much more distinctly than they used to do) with something like a sigh.

"If one failure grieves you in this way, Elizabeth, what would you do if you had chosen a path from which you could not turn back, although you knew that it was wrong? There are many men and women whose lives are based upon what you would call, I suppose, wrong-doing."

There was little of his usual sneering emphasis in the words. His face had fallen into an expression of trouble and sadness which it did not often wear; but there was so much less hardness in its lines than there had been of late that Elizabeth felt that she might answer him freely and frankly.

"I don't think there is any path of wrong-doing from which one might not turn back, Percival. And it seems to me that the worst misery one could go through would be the continuing in any such path; because the consciousness of wrong would spoil all the beauty of life and take the flavour out of every enjoyment. It would end, I think, by breaking ones heart altogether."

"A true woman's view," said Percival, starting up and releasing her hands, "but not one that is practicable in the world of men. I suppose you think you know one man, at least, who would come up to your ideal in that respect?"

"I know several; you amongst them," she replied. "I am sure you would not deliberately do a wicked, dishonourable action for the world."

"You have more faith in me than I deserve," he said, walking restlessly up and down the room. "I am not so sure--but of one thing I am quite sure, Elizabeth," and he came up to her and put his hands on her shoulders, "I am quite sure that you are the best and truest woman that ever lived, and I beg your pardon if I seemed for one moment to doubt you. Will you grant it to me, darling?"

For the first time since the beginning of the visit, she looked at him gratefully, and even affectionately.

"I have nothing to forgive you," she said. "If only I could forgive myself!" And then she burst into tears, and Percival forgot his ill-humour and his sense of wrong in trying to soothe her into calmness again.

This conversation made them both happier. Elizabeth lost her unnatural passiveness of demeanour, and looked more like her clear-headed, energetic self; and Percival was less exacting and overbearing than he had been during the past week. He went back to London with a strong conviction that time would give him Elizabeth's heart as well as her hand; and that she would learn to forget the unprincipled scoundrel--so Percival termed him--who had dared to aspire to her love.

The Herons were to return to London in November, and the purchase of Elizabeth's trousseau was postponed until then. But other preparations were immediately begun: there was a great talk of "settlements" and "entail" in the house; and Mr. Colquhoun had some very long and serious interviews with his fair client. It need hardly be stated that Mr.