Apparently astonishment dried her tears. She looked at him in a sort of petrified wonder.
"I really mean it, my dear," he went on with a paternal air which was exceedingly droll in Jack Neligage. "I'll say more. I never meant for a minute to marry you. I knew you didn't want to have me, and I'd no notion of being tied to a dragooned wife."
"A dragooned wife?" May repeated.
She was evidently so stupefied by the turn things had taken that she could not follow him.
"A woman dragooned into marrying me," Jack explained, with a jovial grin; "one that was thinking all the time how much happier she would be with somebody else."
"And you never meant to marry me? Then what did you get engaged to me for?"
"I didn't. You wrote me that you were engaged to me, and of course as a gentleman I couldn't contradict a lady, especially on a point so delicate as that."
May flushed as red as the fingers of dawn.
"Your mother—" she began; but he interrupted her.
"Isn't it best that we don't go into that?" he said in a graver voice. "I confess that I amused myself a little, and I thought that you needed a lesson. There were other things, but no matter. I never was the whelp you and Alice thought me."