He told me so himself
when I charged him with having been seen in your company. So, Mysie, you
may as well look cheerful. Your turn will come next with some one in
your own station."
There are words which stimulate and confirm; there are others that seem
to kill the nerve and take away the sense, nor can we ever tell the
effect till we see it produced; and so we could not have told
beforehand--nay, we would have looked for something quite opposite--that
Mysie, shrinking and irritable as she was by nature, was saved from a
faint (which had for some moments been threatening her) by the cruel
insult which thus had been added to her misfortune. She had even power
to have recourse to that strange device of some natures, that of
"affecting to be not affected;" and casting a glance at the fine lady,
she turned and went away without uttering a single word. But who knows
the pain of the conventional concealment of pain except those who have
experienced the agony of the trial? Even at the moment when she heard
that George Balgarnie was to be married, and that she came to know that
she had been for weeks sewing the marriage dress of his bride, she was
carrying under her heart the living burden which was the fruit of her
love for that man.
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