But Olwen was mutinous. Had he come down here to propose? Let him do it! she thought. She resolved that she would not be cheated out of a single word of it. "Then——" in itself was not going to count as a proposal. "Then——," indeed!
"Then——!" Oh, dear no.
Immediately Olwen put on that look which is scarcely a look, but is for all that a defence past which no man's love-making may come. Immediately Captain Ross's own look changed to one of dashed and angry surprise. He had put out his arm. It dropped to his side while he watched this girl.
She sat down, her little figure almost lost in the embrace of a chair like a cretonne-covered bed. "Won't you sit down?" she said in the voice of a hostess, pointing to an opposite chair.
He did not move.
She, feeling that never before had she been mistress of the situation, and that perhaps never again would she have the opportunity, spoke first with a composure which startled herself.
"Why," she asked, "should it be supposed to have anything to do with you whether or not I was going to marry Mr. Ellerton?"
And now Captain Ross moved so abruptly against the mantelpiece that he shifted one of the handleless china teacups out of its place and set the prisms tinkling on the candlesticks.
He opened his mouth, then shut it as if he'd thought better of the answer which he meant to make to this chit. And then, in the tone of stinging reproof which he reserved for some careless error in the reading of some letter at the Honeycomb, he said, looking down upon her, "I should have thought that a girl of your intelligence would have had the sense to guess by this time what my object was in wanting to know what your ideas were on the subject of getting married."
Olwen, with a tiny turn of her head, remained silent, watching the sunset, which could just be seen over the Rival mountains out of the other window. This last remark of Captain Ross's she was not going to take as a proposal either.