Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 343: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

396 REYNOLDS’ WORKS an earnest entreaty on his eyes and his lips, that she could not bear to reproach him. ‘Look me in the face, Juliana,’’ he said, his voice again becoming sad and mournful; ‘‘ look me in the face, not as you are doing now, with all the blandishments of your beauty, but look at me seriously and steadily, and tell me deliberately and frankly whether you ere now expressed your precise meaning, and whether you still adhere to it, that you are to marry another, but that you will continue to regard me as—as—TI cannot speak the word. again. And yet pause, Juliana, before you answer me. Remember that your:love has been given to me, and that we are already the same as husband and wife in the sight of Heaven. Can you in honour, can you in delicacy, can you in decency, accompany another to the altar? Can you so far deceive the confiding heart of some fond and no doubt good and honourable man by suffering him to suppose that it is a virgin bride whom he is to receive to his arms? ”’ “Frank,” responded the Honourable Miss Farefield, the flush of mingled indignation, shame, and humiliation rising to her countenance, for she was now truly indignant, and unable to conceal this anger of hers, “ you are abusing the position to which my love has raised you in respect to myself. It ill becomes you, Frank, to make my weakness a subject of reproach, and did I love you less, I should be more offended still at this lecture which you are taking upon yourself to read me. Come, my dear boy, let me hear no more of such speeches from your lips. Have I not offered to do all that woman can for you? I must ensure my own position, and our happiness may remain uninterrupted. Dear Frank, tell me that you are satisfied with what I have proposed, and I will no longer be angry with you for the manner in which you addressed me. And now, do not be offended, my dear boy, but take whatsoever I have about-me at this moment. Here is gold —”’ Thus speaking, Juliana drew forth her purse, but with a sudden cry of indignation and aversion — of wounded pride and bitter disappointment — Francis Paton sprang up from the seat in the arbour, dashed the purse from her hand, and bending upon the astounded and even affrighted lady a look so strange, so wild, and so full of ineffable feelings, that it was never afterward effaced from her memory, he ae Ct te SPE CS (Eo) Gomilchoo