Though he raised his eyebrows in surprise that she should introduce the subject, he managed to say, "He seems pretty game."
"He does; but I dare say he isn't as game as he looks. There's a good deal before him still."
"If we're married on the 28th he'd have one care the less."
"Because I should be taken off his hands. I'm afraid that's not the way to look at it. The real fact is that he'd have nobody to help him."
"I've two months' leave. You could do a lot for him in that time."
She bent over her piece of work. It was the sofa-cushion she had laid aside on the day when she learned from Davenant that her father's troubles were like Jack Berrington's. They had come back for coffee to the rustic seat on the lawn. For the cups and coffee service a small table had been brought out beside which she sat. Ashley had so far recovered his sang-froid as to be able to enjoy a cigar.
"Would you be very much hurt," she asked, without raising her head, "if I begged you to go back to England without our being married at all?"
"Oh, but I say!"
The protest was not over-strong. He was neither shocked nor surprised. A well-bred woman, finding herself in such trouble as hers, would naturally offer him some way of escape from it.
"You see," she went on, "things are so complicated already that if we got married we should complicate them more. There's so much to be done—as to papa—and this house—and the future—of the kind of thing you don't know anything about. They're sordid things, too, that you'd be wasted on if you tried to learn them."