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Updated: June 8, 2025
The old gentleman shuffled heavily up to her, and kissed her on the forehead. "God bless you, and God's will be done, my darling!" said he; but at that moment he could say no more. An hour afterward, however, when the professor knocked the ashes out of his second pipe, and laid his hand upon the latch of Bressant's door, the expression upon his strongly-cut features was neither gloomy nor severe.
Darkness had fallen, and the lighted interior of the crowded car had duplicated itself, through the medium of the glass window-pane, upon the black vacancy without, long before the train halted at the station which marked the boundary of Bressant's riding privilege. He got out, and was immediately smitten in the face by the cold, impalpable fingers of a thick falling snow-storm.
Guilty or not, there it was, and she could not help it. The news of Bressant's engagement to Sophie was a relief and a pleasure to her. The real pain hard and bitter, and with no redeeming grain of consolation had been the unexpected and unexplained change in his manner.
"Do you think men's ideas of love, and such things, are as high as women's?" asked she presently. "Why shouldn't they be?" answered Sophie, coming back from her reverie with a sigh. "I'm sure Bressant's are: if they weren't " She sank again into thought, and another long silence followed. This time Cornelia's hands were still, but she watched Sophie closely.
The old gentleman, in dressing-gown and slippers, came thumping hastily down-stairs, in response to Bressant's summons. The strange solemnity in the latter's tone, no less than the ominousness of the hour, probably gave him premonition of some disaster.
Bressant's poison was in fact an elixir, whose delicious intoxication he had experienced once, and which his whole nature secretly but urgently craved to taste again.
The laugh died away in Bressant's eyes, and he pressed his hand rapidly down over his face, as if to sharpen his wits, or clear away cobwebs. "That's natural," he remarked, reflectively. "I never saw any thing like you." "If he'd said 'any body," thought Cornelia, "I should have said he meant to compliment. How funny he is! just like a boy in some ways.
But the sun which makes flowers bloom brings forth weeds as well, and it would not be strange if this awakening of Bressant's dormant faculties should have also brought some evil to the surface which else might never have seen the light.
Love what you can understand that's the way! See how wise I've become." Bressant's laugh affected Cornelia like a deadly drug. Her speech was fettered, and she moved without her own will or guidance. "I found out just in time that I needed more body and less soul less goodness and more Cornelia!" he concluded, epigrammatically. So this was her position. It could hardly be more humiliating.
As Cornelia looked up from the pure and innocent features which never had worn an awful and forbidding expression until now, when all power of expression was gone her glance and Bressant's met; but, after a moment's encounter, both dropped their eyes, with an involuntary shudder. Their trial and sentence were condensed into so seemingly brief a space.
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