Felix Holt, the Radical. George Eliot

said Mr. Lyon. "I had no brothers and sisters."

      "Why were you not married?" Annette had never thought of asking that question before.

      "Because I never loved any woman—till now. I thought I should never marry. Now I wish to marry."

      Annette started. She did not see at once that she was the woman he wanted to marry; what had flashed on her mind was, that there might be a great change in Mr. Lyon's life. It was as if the lightning had entered into her dream and half awaked her.

      "Do you think it foolish, Annette, that I should wish to marry?"

      "I did not expect it," she said, doubtfully. "I did not know you thought about it."

      "You know the woman I should like to marry?"

      "I know her?" she said, interrogatively, blushing deeply.

      "It is you, Annette—you whom I have loved better than my duty. I forsook everything for you."

      Mr. Lyon paused: he was about to do what he felt would be ignoble—to urge what seemed like a claim.

      "Can you love me, Annette? Will you be my wife?" Annette trembled and looked miserable.

      "Do not speak—forget it," said Mr. Lyon, rising suddenly and speaking with loud energy. "No, no—I do not want it—I do not wish it."

      The baby awoke as he started up; he gave the child into Annette's arms, and left her.

      His work took him away early the next morning and the next again. They did not need to speak much to each other. The third day Mr. Lyon was too ill to go to work. His frame had been overwrought; he had been too poor to have sufficiently nourishing food, and under the shattering of his long deferred hope his health had given away. They had no regular servant—only occasional help from an old woman, who lit the fires and put on the kettles. Annette was forced to be the sick-nurse, and this sudden demand on her shook away some of her torpor. The illness was a serious one, and the medical man one day hearing Mr. Lyon in his delirium raving with an astonishing fluency in Biblical language, suddenly looked round with increased curiosity at Annette, and asked if she were the sick man's wife, or some other relative.

      "No—no relation," said Annette, shaking her head. "He has been good to me."

      "How long have you lived with him?"

      "More than a year."

      "Was he a preacher once?"

      "Yes."

      "When did he leave off being a preacher?"

      "Soon after he took care of me."

      "Is that his child?"

      "Sir," said Annette, coloring indignantly, "I am a widow."

      The doctor, she thought, looked at her oddly, but he asked no more questions.

      When the sick man was getting better, and able to enjoy invalid's food, he observed one day, while he was taking some broth, that Annette was looking at him; he paused to look at her in return, and was struck with a new expression in her face, quite distinct from the merely passive sweetness which usually characterized it. She laid her little hand on his, which was now transparently thin, and said, "I am getting very wise; I have sold some of the books to make money—the doctor told me where; and I have looked into the shops where they sell caps and bonnets and pretty things, and I can do all that, and get more money to keep us. And when you are well enough to get up, we will go out and be married—shall we not? See! and la petite" (the baby had never been named anything else) "shall call you Papa—and then we shall never part."

      Mr. Lyon trembled. This illness—something else, perhaps—had made a great change in Annette. A fortnight after that they were married. The day before he had ventured to ask her if she felt any difficulty about her religion, and if she would consent to have la petite baptized and brought up as a Protestant. She shook her head and said very simply—

      "No: in France, in other days, I would have minded; but all is changed. I never was fond of religion, but I knew it was right. J'aimais les fleurs, les bals, la musique, et mon mari qui était beau. But all that is gone away. There is nothing of my religion in this country. But the good God must be here, for you are good; I leave all to you."

      It was clear that Annette regarded her present life as a sort of death to the world—an existence on a remote island where she had been saved from wreck. She was too indolent mentally, too little interested, to acquaint herself with any secrets of the isle. The transient energy, the more vivid consciousness and sympathy which had been stirred in her during Mr. Lyon's illness, had soon subsided into the old apathy to everything except her child. She withered like a plant in strange air, and the three years of life that remained were but a slow and gentle death. Those three years were to Mr. Lyon a period of such self-suppression and life in another as few men know. Strange! that the passion for this woman, which he felt to have drawn him aside from the right as much as if he had broken the most solemn vows—for that only was right to him which he held the best and highest—the passion for a being who had no glimpse of his thoughts induced a more thorough renunciation than he had ever known in the time of his complete devotion to his ministerial career. He had no flattery now, either from himself or the world; he knew that he had fallen, and his world had forgotten him, or shook their heads at his memory. The only satisfaction he had was the satisfaction of his tenderness—which meant untiring work, untiring patience, untiring wakefulness even to the dumb signs of feeling in a creature whom he alone cared for.

      The day of parting came, and he was left with little Esther as the one visible sign of that four years' break in his life. A year afterward he entered the ministry again, and lived with the utmost sparingness that Esther might be so educated as to be able to get her own bread in case of his death. Her probable facility in acquiring French naturally suggested his sending her to a French school, which would give her a special advantage as a teacher. It was a Protestant school, and French Protestantism had the high recommendation of being non-Prelatical. It was understood that Esther would contract no Papistical superstitions; and this was perfectly true; but she contracted, as we see, a good deal of non-Papistical vanity.