Read "An Open Verdict" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
BY what serpentine twists and windings Bella Scratchell reached the end she had in view need not be recorded. She was by nature a creature of many curves, and all her progress in life was devious and indirect. Enough that she succeeded in making Beatrix Harefield believe her lost lover false and fickle, and thus undermined the girl's respect for the man who had renounced her. So long as Beatrix could believe that Cyril had sacrificed his heart's desire to his duty as priest and teacher, she would have continued to reverence and love him. Present or absent, he would have remained the one central figure in her life. From the moment she was persuaded to think him the shallow lover of a day -- or indeed, worse than this, a lover who had been drawn to her by the lure of her wealth, and who at the bottom of his heart had always preferred Bella's lilies and roses -- from that moment she despised him, and concentrated all the forces of her mind in the endeavour to forget him.
‘I will never pray for him or his work again,' she vowed to herself, and the vow had all the savagery of a pagan oath. ‘His name shall never pass my lips or find a place in my heart. It shall be to me as if such a man had never lived.'