For some months--for the bright honeymoon period of her wedded
life--Marian had been completely happy in that out-of-the-world region.
It is not to be supposed that she had done so great a wrong to Gilbert
Fenton except under the influence of a great love, or the dominion of a
nature powerful enough to subjugate her own. Both these influences had
been at work. Too late she had discovered that she had never really loved
Gilbert Fenton; that the calm grateful liking which she had told herself
must needs be the sole version of the grand passion whereof her nature
was capable, had been only the tamest, most ordinary kind of friendship
after all, and that in the depths of her soul there was a capacity for an
utterly different attachment--a love which was founded on neither respect
nor gratitude, but which sprang into life in a moment, fatal and
all-absorbing from its birth.
Heaven knows she had struggled bravely against this luckless passion, had
resisted long and steadily the assiduous pursuit, the passionate
half-despairing pleading, of her lover, who would not be driven away, and
who invented all kinds of expedients for seeing her, however difficult
the business might be, or however resolutely she might endeavour to avoid
him. It was only after her uncle's death, when her mind was weakened by
excessive grief, that her strong determination to remain faithful to her
absent betrothed had at last given way before the force of those tender
passionate prayers, and she had consented to the hasty secret marriage
which her lover had proposed.
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