"I wonder," Burleigh mused, "if she would be angry if I asked her to marry me; or if she'd have me. She'd be a fool if she did! she knows so much, and is so used to great people! I suppose it is no use to bother my head for what I can't have. But I want her; and she's been very good to me; and perhaps—perhaps she wouldn't really say no. I'm a fool to lose the chance by being afraid to speak! Confound it! a woman's no right to be angry with a fellow for being in love with her. He can't help it, I suppose. I'm sure I can't. Besides I've heard her say she'd like to live in Montfield all her life."
He had thrown himself half-dressed upon the bed, his monkish masquerade costume hanging over a chair near by. Turning and twisting about uneasily as the conflict in his mind became more and more earnest, the silver-pieces loose in his pocket rattled out, one rolling from the bed to the floor. He raised himself, and picked it up. It was a Mexican dollar, dated the year of his birth, and he had for years carried it as a pocket-piece.
"I have half a mind," he soliloquized, tossing the coin in his hand, "to offer myself this very night. I don't think it would be so hard with this suit on as it would in my own clothes. It would be more natural to do any thing extraordinary in a mask. I've a mind to toss up for it. That is one way of settling it. It might go against me, though. However, it won't be any harm to see what it would have been if I had tried it."
The coin went spinning into the air.
"Heads!" he called aloud. "Humph!" he commented inwardly, "It's tails. But of course I should have tried the best two in three. Heads! And heads it is, by thunder! That's one and one. Heads! Confound it, it's tails again. But then that was only to try what might have been. Here goes in earnest. Heads!"
The dollar struck upon the edge of the bed, and Burleigh cried out "Bar that!" then, picking it up, found the head uppermost.
"Why didn't I let that go?" he said. "Heads!"
The coin spun round and round gayly. When at last it lay still, the reverse stared the lover in the face.
"Plague take that dollar! it is always tails. I'll change it, and begin again. Heads now!"
The new coin proved no less perverse than the old one, and turned its back toward the young man quite as resolutely as its predecessor.