'Then she knows the worst,' he said—'the very worst. There is nothing else she has got to learn about me. There is only one thing to be done, Wattles, with a girl who knows so much about me: I must marry her. You must introduce me again, old man, and I shall make her an offer, and—and she will marry me.'
His gloom and depression had quite gone, and he was smiling again. He was a delightful fellow when he smiled. Not a man in the college could resist that delightful smile; it disarmed the wrath of all the Dons, and it won the hearts of bed-makers.
'Marry her!' said Eric, turning quite pale. 'Dear old man, don't be in such a hurry. Think it over. She isn't the sort of woman for you, Edgell.'
Wyatt Edgell laughed. His laugh was a full-blown edition of his smile; but Gwatkin looked serious.
'Perhaps you'll tell me, Wattles, what is the sort of woman for me.'
'Oh, I wouldn't pretend to say; only, old man, don't trifle with this poor little thing. She's the sort of girl to break her heart for a man. I wouldn't break her heart if I were you.'
'Perhaps she'll break mine,' said Edgell dryly; and then he sat down and ate his lunch which the bed-maker had already spread out on the table.
It was a very nice college lunch. It was not tinned beef, or brawn, or tongue, or any questionable dainty that had been soldered up a year or two in a metal case. It was a lovely head and shoulders of salmon, and it had been judiciously pickled, and there was cucumber cut up in a dish—little delicate flakes of cucumber which Edgell ate with the healthy returning appetite of a man who had long been denied this delicacy.
The salmon was followed by a chicken and a ham, to which he also applied himself with the same zest. The edge was quite taken off his appetite, when Eric pushed these things aside and set a jelly just freshly turned out of a mould before him.