At Last Comes Love (hq-3) by Mary Balogh

Author:Mary Balogh [Balogh, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: love_history

13

A FEW minutes later they were out on the pavement, Margaret shivering slightly beneath her shawl. The air seemed loud with the silence.

Lord Sheringford offered his arm and she took it. "What are your thoughts?" he asked her after they had walked for a little while without talking. "I scarcely know," she said. "I feel as if my whole life has been turned upside down." "Would you rather," he said, "that I ceased courting you? Your reputation would recover very quickly and leave you quite unscathed.

Gossip soon dies when there is nothing to feed it." "I think," she said, "that what I /would/ rather, Lord Sheringford, is an explanation of why you are not sorry, or why you refuse to apologize to that poor man. Is it just stubbornness? Or is it really love? Was Mrs. Turner the great passion of your life, worth everything you gave up, including your character and honor? And worth your refusal to do the right thing and admit that you caused irreparable suffering to her husband?" She shivered again. Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders and exposed them to the cool air of late evening.

He stopped walking and lifted her shawl, wrapping it more closely about her and keeping one arm about her shoulders to hold it in place. He was looking very directly into her eyes, though she could scarcely see him in the darkness. She could smell the wine he had been drinking. "The great passion of my life?" he said. "It would be a terrible insult to you if I were to continue to woo you and allow you to believe that to be a possibility. I did not love Laura at all, Maggie – not in any romantic sense, anyway." She gazed at him, baffled. They were beneath a straight row of trees that had been planted along the edge of the pavement, she realized suddenly. That was why it was so dark despite the fact that the sky was bright with moon and stars. The street was deserted. There was not even a night watchman in sight. "Then it is only stubbornness?" she said. "An un willingness to admit that a fleeting passion ruined lives, including your own? And you think other people, including me, will respect you for your steadfast stubbornness? You believe it to be unmanly to admit that you did something so dreadfully wrong, its effects quite irreversible? Admitting you were wrong, asking pardon, is the only decent, manly course of action remaining to you – surely?" He sighed. "I ought to have apologized profusely to you when we collided in Lady Tindell's ballroom," he said, "and allowed you to hurry on your way to wherever it was you were going. I ought to have chosen someone with far less firm opinions to save me from penury. Maggie, there are many kinds of decency. Snatching a married lady from her husband and running off with her is sometimes the most decent thing a man can think of to do.

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