Elinor's hands dropped from his arm. She drew herself up until she seemed to tower over him. "And why should I say it is not Mr. Compton," she asked, with a scarlet flush of anger, so different from that rosy red of love and happiness, covering her face.
"Phil Compton! the _dis_-Honourable Phil! Why, Elinor! you cannot mean it! you must not mean it!" he cried.
Elinor said not a word. She turned from him with a look of pathetic reproach but with the air of a queen, and walked into the house, he following in a ferment of wrath and trouble, yet humbled and miserable more than words could say. Oh, the flowery, peaceful house! jasmine and rose overleaping each other upon the porch, honeysuckle scenting the air, all manner of feminine contrivances to continue the greenness and the sweetness into the little bright hall, into the open drawing-room, where flowers stood on every table amid the hundred pretty trifles of a woman's house. There was no one in this room where she led him, and then turned round confronting him, taller than he had ever seen her before, pale, with her nostrils dilating and her lips trembling. "I never thought it possible that you of all people in the world, you, John--my stand-by since ever I was a baby--my---- Oh! what a horrid thing it is to be a woman," cried Elinor, stamping her foot, "to be ready to cry for everything!--you, John! that I always put my trust in--that you should turn against me--and at the very first word!"
"Elinor," he said, "my dear girl! not against you, not against you, for all the world!"
"And what is _me_?" she said, with that sudden turning of the tables and high scorn of her previous argument which is common with women; "do I care what you do to _me_? Oh, nothing, nothing! I am of no account, you can trample me down under your feet if you like. But what I will not bear," she said, clenching her hands, "is injustice to him: that I will not bear, neither from you, Cousin John, who are only my distant cousin, after all, and have no right to thrust your advice upon me--or from any one in the world."
"What you say is quite true, Elinor, I am only a distant cousin--after all: but----"
"Oh, no, no," she cried, flying to him, seizing once more his arm with her clinging hands, "I did not mean that--you know I did not mean that, my more than brother, my good, good John, whom I have trusted all my life!"