She laughed again, this time more shyly. "'Trust is proof,'" she answered, quoting the rustic adage. "You have given me some right to make that proof, I think?"
Ah—to be sure—the letters! She must, of course, have received his letter, along with 'Bias's, though this was her first allusion to it. . . . Cai's brain worked in a whirl for some moments. She was offering him a test; she was yielding upon honest and prudent conditions; she was as good as inviting him to win her. . . . To do him justice, he had never—never, at any rate, consciously—based his wooing on her wealth. For aught he cared, she might continue to administer all she possessed. The comforts of Rilla Farm may have helped to attract him, but herself had been from the first the true spell.
He did not profess any knowledge of finance. A return of four per cent on his own modest investments contented him, and he left these to Mr Rogers.
"Ah!"
His mind had caught, of a sudden, at a really brilliant idea.
"I accept," said he firmly, looking Mrs Bosenna hard in the eyes, and her eyes sank under his gaze.
"Hi! Heads!" sang out a voice, and simultaneously the ladder which William Skin had been hauling aloft, came crashing down and struck the flagged path scarcely two yards away.
A second later Cai had Mrs Bosenna in his arms. "You are not hurt?" he gasped.
She disengaged herself with a half-hysterical laugh. "Hurt?
Am I? . . . No, of course I am not."
"The damned rope slipped," growled William Skin in explanation, from his perch on the ladder under the eaves.