“No,” said Sir Charles surprised by this blunt reference to a subject they had never before discussed. “He does not intend to propose to Miss Lindsay.”
“But he did intend to.”
“He certainly did, but he has given up the idea.”
“Why?” said Trefusis, apparently disapproving strongly of the renunciation.
Sir Charles shrugged his shoulders and did not reply.
“I am sorry to hear it. I wish you could induce him to change his mind. He is a nice fellow, with enough to live on comfortably, whilst he is yet what is called a poor man, so that she could feel perfectly disinterested in marrying him. It will do her good to marry without making a pecuniary profit by it; she will respect herself the more afterwards, and will neither want bread and butter nor be ashamed of her husband’s origin, in spite of having married for love alone. Make a match of it if you can. I take an interest in the girl; she has good instincts.”
Sir Charles’s suspicion that Trefusis was really paying court to Agatha returned after this conversation, which he repeated to Erskine, who, much annoyed because his poems had been shown to a reader of Blue Books, thought it only a blind for Trefusis’s design upon Gertrude. Sir Charles pooh-poohed this view, and the two friends were sharp with one another in discussing it. After dinner, when the ladies had left them, Sir Charles, repentant and cordial, urged Erskine to speak to Gertrude without troubling himself as to the sincerity of Trefusis. But Erskine, knowing himself ill able to brook a refusal, was loth to expose himself.
“If you had heard the tone of her voice when she asked him whether he was in earnest, you would not talk to me like this,” he said despondently. “I wish he had never come here.”
“Well, that, at least, was no fault of mine, my dear fellow,” said Sir Charles. “He came among us against my will. And now that he appears to have been in the right—legally—about the field, it would look like spite if I cut him. Besides, he really isn’t a bad man if he would only let the women alone.”
“If he trifles with Miss Lindsay, I shall ask him to cross the Channel, and have a shot at him.”