"Silence gives consent,"--he went on--"Besides I'm sure you don't mind. You know plenty of men who can never talk comfortably without puffing smoke in between whiles. I'm one of that sort. Don't look at me like Cleopatra deprived of Marc Antony. Be reasonable! I only want to say a few plain matter-of-fact words to you---"

"Say them then as quickly as possible, please,"--she replied--"I am NOT a good listener!"

"No? Now I should have thought you were, judging by the patience with which you endured the parson's general discursiveness. What a superb night!" He stepped from the portal out on the old flagstones of the courtyard. "Take just one turn with me, Maryllia!"

Quietly, and with an air of cold composure she came to him, and walked slowly at his side. He looked at her covertly, yet critically.

"I won't make love to you,"--he said presently, with a smile-- "because you tell me you don't like it. I will merely put a case before you and ask for your opinion! Have I your permission?"

She bent her head slightly. Her throat was dry,--her heart was beating painfully,--she knew Roxmouth's crafty and treacherous nature, and her whole soul sickened as she realised that now he could, if he chose, drag the name of John Walden through a mire of social mud, and hold it up to ridicule among his own particular 'set,' who would certainly lose no time in blackening it with their ever-ready tar-brush. And it was all through her--all through her! How would she ever forgive herself if his austere and honourable reputation were touched in ever so slight a degree by a breath of scandal? Unconsciously, she clasped her little hands and wrung them hard--Roxmouth saw the action, and quickly fathomed the inward suffering it indicated.

"You know my dearest ambition,"--he went on,--"and I need not emphasise it. It is to call you my wife. If you consent to marry me, you take at once a high position in the society to which you naturally belong. But you tell me I am detestable to you--and that you would rather die than accept me as a husband. I confess I do not understand your attitude,--and, if you will allow me to say so, I hardly think you understand it yourself. You are in a state of uncertainty--most women live always in that state;--and your vacillating soul like a bewildered butterfly--you see I am copying the clerical example by dropping into poetry!--and a butterfly, NOT a cigarette, is I believe the correct emblem of Psyche,--" here he took a whiff at his cigar, and smiled pleasantly--"your soul, I repeat, like a bewildered butterfly, has lighted by chance on a full-flowering parson. The flight--the pause on that maturely-grown blossom of piety, is pardonable,--but I cannot contemplate with pleasure the idea of your compromising your name with that of this sentimental middle-aged individual who, though he may be an excellent Churchman, would make rather a grotesque lover!"




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