Daniel did not wish to pursue this aspect of the matter. He wanted Muriel, but he wished her to be sure of her love before he bound her to him by a formal engagement: this summed up his attitude in a single sentence. He therefore discussed the question along these lines; but it was apparent that he was labouring under great mental and emotional stress. He begged Lord Blair not to influence his daughter in one direction or the other, but to leave the solution of the problem in the hands of Providence.
“I just want her to feel,” he explained, “that I am an intimate chum of hers; and then if the thing carries us both off our feet, why we’ll come to you and say we want to get married. If not—well, I’m not going to bind her unless it’s clear she is as head over ears in love with me as I am now with her.”
“You may lose her,” said Lord Blair, shaking his head wisely.
“If that is going to be at any time likely,” Daniel answered, “I would rather it happened now than after we are married.”
When the interview was at an end Lord Blair sat for some time in deep thought. He was somewhat disappointed that Daniel was not more impetuous, and he saw no reason why Muriel should be treated with such careful consideration, lest she should make a mistake and suffer for it later. He regarded his daughter as decidedly flighty, and, since she was his heiress, he wanted to see her married as soon as possible to the man of his choice, a man of strong will who would keep her well in hand: but that, to his surprise, was just what the mighty Daniel seemed disinclined to do.
Lord Blair did not believe in a man pandering to the whims of the woman he loved: his own experience had been too devastating for that. He would have liked to have heard Daniel say to him: “Your daughter wants mastering: I will take her in hand, and turn her into a dutiful wife and a God-fearing mother of your Blair-Lane grandsons.” But instead of this he had said in effect: “Since I shall always want her, if she wants me she can have me when she wants;” and this seemed a poor policy, bordering on self-abnegation.
Muriel’s own attitude was interesting. During this and the day following she waited breathlessly for a proposal of marriage, and when none was forthcoming, she decided that she would give him one week and then lose her temper. But the week went by, and nothing happened, except that their intimacy grew and their eyes sought one another more frequently.
His work kept him very busy, but daily he found some moment in which he could be alone with her; and at these times he put his arms about her and looked into her face with such tenderness in his eyes that she could have cried. He seemed to be searching her heart, to be trying to assure himself of her love; and when he kissed her he appeared to restrain the passion which she knew was consuming him.
Once he came so near to a definite offer of marriage that she held her breath. Yet what he said was but this: “Life is short, and there is no time for a mistake. Think, Muriel, think!—You and I will soon have to make a decision which cannot be altered. Think of all those things in my method of life which you don’t like or don’t understand. Because the choice is close at hand.”
And in her bedroom, in the darkness of the night, she had thought; but her thoughts had travelled in circles, leading her nowhere. Perhaps, she said to herself, he wished to hint that there were ugly aspects of his life which she ought to take into consideration: perhaps he was referring to those Bedouin women who were said to have been his mistresses in the desert; or perhaps his frequent visits to the bazaars and to native houses were not entirely dictated by the needs of his work. She knew that women of the poorer classes often came to see him at the Residency; and the stories which had come to her ears of his goodness to widows and destitute paupers might have their origin in less worthy circumstances than was supposed. It looked as though his conscience were smiting him.