And Marion herself, holding the girl tightly in all affection, and stroking the dark head with a tender touch, felt a sudden helplessness. This was not the Philippa she had expected to see. She had read her letter with the utmost surprise, not to say consternation, and, womanlike, had read into the simple communication a very great deal that had not been in it at all.
That Philippa should feel affection for the man whom she had come to know under such extraordinary circumstances she could well believe; it was entirely in keeping with her estimate of the girl's character, and she had, in fact, said as much to her husband from the first. "Philippa will love any one who wants her badly enough," she had said. "It is simply her loving heart and her pity that lead her into it." But that she should think of marriage was almost unbelievable; it could not be allowed.
She had imagined Philippa composed, even happy--indeed the girl had said as much when she wrote--uplifted by a sense of heroism which was possibly quite unconscious--ready to take a course to which her sympathy and her compassion impelled her, without any thought of what the consequences might be, so far as she herself was concerned.
As she, Marion, well knew, the bodily weakness of a man can be in itself a great attraction to a certain type of woman, and no doubt Phil had been carried off her feet by his very need of her--blinded by her emotions so that she could not see that they were misleading her, to say the least of it. And instead of this, she found a Philippa radiant, palpitating, blissful, with eyes that shone with gladness through a veil of dreams.
It was so utterly unexpected that it cut the ground of all her carefully prepared arguments away from underneath her feet. She drew Philippa to a couch and they sat down side by side.
There was silence for a while, and then the girl began recounting in a low voice the steps which one by one had led her to the present moment. She did not find it easy. It was hard to forget that under Marion's kind and grave attention there must be, for all her love, the little barrier raised by the dissentient voice of her conscience. It had been much easier to be quite frank with Isabella, whose love for Francis swept aside every scruple, every obstacle, but with Marion it was different. It was not that she could not understand the power of love, or was incapable of sacrificing herself on love's altar; she was essentially a woman who knew love at its very best and strongest, and who would at any time have laid down her life for the beloved; but there was another thing more precious to her than life, and that was righteousness. She had in her some of the stuff of which martyrs were made, and she would have torn her heart out by the roots sooner than have stepped into happiness over the grave of a principle. And to her, at any rate, it was clear that in this case a very precious principle was being violated, for the whole matter hung upon a deception. Truth was right, and untruth was wrong, and her whole heart was bent upon bringing Philippa to a correct vision of right.