“All the more reason why I should refuse to be the means of bringing dissension between you. Why, it would be murderous—absolutely murderous, after what you have told me. I am not forgetting either that you have a certain position.”
“Oh, hang the ‘position’!” cried Dick. “But you are very cool and—er—judicial over it all, Hazel. If you cared as much as I do.”
“Perhaps, dear, I am speaking and acting in your own interests,” answered the girl, softly. “I am setting you a test. It might be that when you get back home again something might transpire which would make you devoutly thankful to me for having refused to allow you to engage yourself to some little nobody whom you had found amusing in the course of your wanderings.”
“Hazel! Now you hurt me.”
He looked it. There was no doubt about it that his feelings were deeply wounded, but there was a dignity about the way in which he took it that appealed to her so powerfully as well-nigh to bring about her surrender there and then.
“I didn’t mean to, God knows,” she answered earnestly and more softly still. “But I am looking at things from a sheer common-sense standpoint. You are very brave and strong, Dick, but in one way, I believe I am stronger than you. I am only putting before you a little trial of strength, of endurance. Surely you won’t shrink from that?”
“Let us understand each other, Hazel,” he said gravely, all his boyish light-heartedness gone. “You won’t engage yourself to me until I get my father’s consent?”
“That’s it.”
“But you will, conditionally, on my getting it?”
She thought a minute.