"
And they sat there talking until the sun grew too hot for them.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Royal, the subject of Lady Dacre's curiosity, was
thinking of the visit she was on her way to make which would bring her
within a few miles of Seascape. She dreaded it, yet she knew that her
father was right when he told her that the more she could appear to
treat the question of this marriage as a jest,--a thing which meant
nothing to her,--the wiser she would be. This was the course that by her
father's advice she had marked out for herself. Elizabeth Royal had her
faults; she sometimes tried her friends a good deal by them; but if she
had been Lot's wife, and had gone out of Sodom with him, she would never
have been left on the plain as a bitter warning against vacillation.
Only, it seemed to her a very long time since her restful days had gone
by, and she realized that the one course she hated was to do things
because it was good policy to do them. Before Archdale she was brave;
not only from pride, but out of pity to him; before others, all but her
father, pride restrained her from complaint, even from admission of the
possibility of the disaster she feared.
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