All his years and his experience went for nothing under these circumstances, when she looked as sweet as she did now.
"You must keep Black Agnes," he said eagerly. "I will speak to your uncle. I will not have you riding low-bred brutes. Nothing but the best is fit for you; you, who know how to ride so well, and enjoy it so much! You will keep her, to please me?"
If she had been sitting in a green satin drawing-room she would probably have checked this ardent outburst at an apparently harmless stage. She would have blushed, and looked grave and majestic; but now she was, in a sense, intoxicated. She lifted a pair of radiant, grateful eyes to his face, and she held out her hand impulsively.
"How good you are to me!" she said. "How much pleasure you give me!"
And then, of course, he succumbed altogether.
"That is what I want to do, not now, but always," he said, drawing the mare's head to his knee, and the small, weak hand to his lips, which had kissed so many hands, though never with quite the same kind of kiss. "That is why I am building my house. It is you I wanted to be its mistress—didn't you know that?—to do just what you like with it, and with me, and with all I have!" And, when once he had fairly set it going, the flood of his eloquence, running in a well-channelled groove, flowed freely, and overwhelmed the poor little novice, who had never been made love to before.
"I—we—we have only seen each other a few times," she ventured to suggest at last, but not until her imagination had been captivated by the splendid prospect before her. She had the colour of a peony in her cheeks, and frightened tears in her soft child's eyes; but her experienced lover knew that his cause was gained.
"That has been enough for me," he said. "Once was enough for me." Then, after a long pause, "Well? Is it to be 'yes' or 'no?'"
"Oh, I don't know!" she stammered desperately, turning her head from side to side. "I have had no time. Let us wait until we know each other better."
"I know quite enough," he persisted, "and I am not so young as you are that I can afford to wait."