“So bad?” she whispered. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
He was not a conformable wooer. The love-wise sex shall say if he was a diplomatic one. He threw himself on his knees beside the Fair, seized her in his bear-like grip, and kissed her lips.
“Now,” he said, “it is neck or nothing. None but a parson can wipe out the stain. Hate me now, and put Love to bed for by and by.”
She smiled suddenly—like the rainbow; like an angel.
“Yes,” she said, “if you insist. But the poor thing has slept so long in my heart, that it would fain wake up at last, and confess itself.”
The peer took his settlement with a very bad grace; but he had to take it, and there was an end of him.
“Avenant,” whispered the Fair, on the evening of their wedding day, “I have been vain, spoiled, perhaps untruthful. But I wished to tell you—you can put me to sleep on the middle shelf of your cupboard.”
“It has been converted into a closet for skeletons,” he said. “I was a bachelor then.”
THE LOST NOTES
The faculty of music is generally, I believe, inimical to the development of all the other faculties. Sufficient to itself is the composing gift. There was scarcely ever yet a born musician, I do declare, who, outside his birthright, was not a born ass. I say it with the less irreverence, because my uncle was patently one of the rare exceptions which prove the rule. He knew his Shakespeare as well as his musical-glasses—better than, in fact; for he was a staunch Baconian. This was all the odder because—as was both early and late impressed upon me—he had a strong sense of humour. Perhaps an eternal study of the hieroglyphics of the leger lines was responsible for his craze; for craze I still insist it was, in spite of the way he took to convince me of the value of cryptograms. I was an obstinate pupil, I confess, and withstood to the end the fire of all the big guns which he—together with my friend, Chaunt, who was in the same line—brought to bear upon me.