He interrupted her, gently but peremptorily:—
“Was diffidence ever so perverse! It is no mistake; it must be none. I have not failed to observe, I say; nor must Herbert fail to understand the dishonour his shyness does you by implication. Well, if it is a fact that he was on the point of going—”
“Absolutely, sir,” said the secretary.
“Then,” said Gilead, with a smile, “I will beg you, Nestle, to entrust this rare possession to me for a few minutes. I had come, in fact, in an emergency, to consult Miss Halifax; and hence my intrusion—I will not call it mistimed.”
There was no gainsaying his ruling. He himself saw the secretary to the door, and parted with him with a squeeze of the hand.
“For her sake, Nestle,” he said, “your engagement must not go longer unacknowledged.”
Returning to the room, he found the girl toying with some music at the piano, her back turned to him. He stood silent a moment; and then he exclaimed, with a scarce perceptible sigh:—
“I can say no more in honour now than God bless you both. Miss Halifax—”
A little to his surprise she faced round on him on the instant, her cheeks like sunset roses. Her eyes were sparkling; a psychologist might have read in their expression an impatience of his intolerable stupidity—or chivalry. But in the very act a consciousness of something unusual in his look startled and checked her; and the shadow, as it were, of a desperate word on her lips faded and passed.
“Mr Balm,” she said—her breath came quick—“what is it? What is the matter?”