I ask no more. The rest is my
responsibility--not yours."
"I have nothing to do with what happens--at any time, or in any
place--after the marriage?"
"Nothing whatever."
"I may leave you at the church door if I please?"
"At the church door, with your fee in your pocket."
"Paid from the money in your own possession?"
"Certainly! How else should I pay it?"
Captain Wragge took off his hat, and passed his handkerchief over his
face with an air of relief.
"Give me a minute to consider it," he said.
"As many minutes as you like," she rejoined, reclining on the bank in
her former position, and returning to her former occupation of tearing
up the tufts of grass and flinging them out into the air.
The captain's reflections were not complicated by any unnecessary
divergences from the contemplation of his own position to the
contemplation of Magdalen's. Utterly incapable of appreciating the
injury done her by Frank's infamous treachery to his engagement--an
injury which had severed her, at one cruel blow, from the aspiration
which, delusion though it was, had been the saving aspiration of her
life--Captain Wragge accepted the simple fact of her despair just as he
found it, and then looked straight to the consequences of the proposal
which she had made to him.
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