Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 385: what you’re looking at

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

368 REYNOLDS’ WORKS clinging to him, but not kissing him this time, only looking up earnestly and appealingly into his countenance. ‘ You have said all that you have to say: hear me a few words — in reply. -It is true that I spoke to you yesterday in a manner that may have shocked you, but did I not likewise speak with tenderness and with love? Did I not offer to make every sacrifice that one in my position could possibly consummate? If I dreaded poverty, it was as much on your account as on my own, perhaps more on yours. To acquire gold, therefore, that I might conduce to your comfort, I said that | would marry; and how great must my love be for you, when I was enabled to tutor my soul to think of the marriage tie as a mere expedient for ensuring our happiness, and not as a barrier against it. Do you not think, Frank,’’ continued the wily Juliana, but still tender and impassioned, even at the time when she was thus exer- cising all her astuteness and all the powers of her sophistry, “do you not think, Frank, that it cost me a pang to propose that I would become a wife only to deceive a husband in order that the progress of our loves might continue unin- terrupted? But perhaps you consider me a being lost to all sense of delicacy and propriety — Oh,-Frank, can it be possible that you entertain such an evil opinion of one who loves you so tenderly and so well? ”’ She was still clinging to him as she thus spoke; she was gazing up into his countenance with a look of the most tender and. impassioned appeal; she had thrown into her voice all the most melting cadences of its natural harmony; she omitted no single one of the many blandishments which a woman of artful nature and glowing temperament could possibly exercise on such an occasion. Again was Frank bewildered and troubled, again was he uncertain how to act or what to think. He disengaged himself not from the half-embrace in which she retained him, but he averted his countenance as if the only hope that remained for him ' was in not beholding that beautiful, too beautiful, face, which was upturned toward his own. “Frank,’’ she continued, thoroughly prepared to jilt Mr. Hawkshaw if young Paton would now succumb to her wiles, “ Frank, is it possible that you can forget the inter- view of yesterday? Is it possible to efface it from your mind, —to blot it out from your memory? If so, ask me once Gomichbooks 1 EC@)