Fleda looked wonderingly, and Mrs. Carleton exclaimed, "What trouble?"
"Elfie," said he, without immediately answering his mother, "what would
your conscience do with two promises both of which cannot be kept?"
"What such promises have you made?" said Mrs Carleton eagerly.
"Let me hear first what Fleda says to my question."
"Why," said Fleda, looking a little bewildered,--"I would keep the
right one."
"Not the one first made?" said he smiling.
"No," said Fleda,--"not unless it was the right one."
"But don't you think one ought to keep one's word, in any event?"
"I don't think anything can make it right to do wrong," Fleda said
gravely, and not without a secret trembling consciousness to what point
she was speaking.
He left them and again took several turns up and down the cabin before
he sat down.
"You have not given me your promise yet, Guy," said his mother, whose eye
had not once quitted him. "You said you would."
"I said, if I could."
"Well?--you can?"
"I have two honourable meetings of the proscribed kind now on hand, to
which I stand pledged."
Fleda hid her face in an agony. Mrs. Carleton's agony was in every line of
hers as she grasped her son's wrist exclaiming, "Guy, promise me!" She had
words for nothing else.
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