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Updated: June 7, 2025
The man haggard, dying cherished a pride that had grown fiercer as the grip of poverty tightened upon him. The woman lived only for her husband and her child. The man was Gustave Lenoble. The world had gone ill with him since he cast his destiny into the lap of the woman he loved. In all these years no olive-bearing dove had spanned the gulf that yawned between the prodigal and his father.
But the more intensely she had felt the cold neglect of Valentine, the more grateful to her seemed the unsought affection of Gustave Lenoble. "You know me as little as you know my father, M. Lenoble," she said, after a long pause, during which they had walked to the end of the long dull street, and were close to the square. "Let us go back a little way, please; I have much more to say.
"Yes," said Charlotte, with a sudden blush; "I remember." "That Miss Meynell married a gentleman of Normandy, and left one only child, a son. His name is Gustave Lenoble, and he is standing by your side. He is heir-at-law to a very large fortune, which it was once supposed you could claim.
You see me sitting in my father's room, and because my eyes happen to please you, or for some reason as foolish as that, you ask me to be your wife. I might have been one of the worst of women." "You might have been? yes, dear, but you are not. And if you had been, Gustave Lenoble would not have flung his heart into your lap, even if your eyes had been sweeter than they are.
"You see, as the case now stands, they think they have the claimant to this money in Miss Halliday Sheldon's stepdaughter. But if they got an inkling of Susan Meynell's marriage and, in point of fact the actual state of the case they might try to get hold of my friend, Gustave Lenoble.
Ah, my poor dear! isn't it almost wicked of me to complain, when you have had such bitter experience of the hard cruel world? I am quite in love with your dear Mademoiselle Lenoble; almost as deeply as I am in love with your magnanimous, chivalrous, generous, audacious everything ending in ous Monsieur Lenoble. How dare you call him M. Lenoble, by the bye?
That chivalrous turn of mind which was hereditary in the race of Lenoble predisposed these men to pity loneliness and beauty, weakness and sorrow. This pity for helplessness may have been indeed only an element of their exceeding strength. Was not the rescue of weaklings and women an unfailing attribute in the mighty men of old? Who so prompt as Hercules to fly to the rescue of Hesione?
The stone above the grave of Gustave's wife bore her maiden name, and the comforting familiar text about the one sinner who repenteth. For a week of long days and longer nights there was no step sounded on the stair, no opening or shutting of a door in the old dilapidated house where he lay languishing on the brink of an open grave, that did not move Gustave Lenoble with a sudden emotion of hope.
But I must urge your immediate removal from Bayswater; first, because M. Lenoble will naturally wish to see you oftener than he can while you are residing with people whose acquaintance I do not want him to make; and secondly, because you have no further need of Mrs. Sheldon's patronage." "It has been kindness, affection, papa never patronage. I could not leave Mrs.
Gustave Lenoble was only too glad to claim his promised wife a little sooner than he had hoped to claim her. "Thou hast put me off long enough, cruel," he said; "and now it is thy father's wish that our marriage should be soon. It shall be this week; I will take no longer thine excuses. We shall be the sooner ready to receive thy friends, thy Charlotte and her Hawkehurst." Diana smiled.
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