'I should think I did! You were barely nineteen.'
'And you were nearly eighteen—a very good age for both, considering I had been left my own master twelve months before, with twelve thousand a year. What more did we want?'
'A little wisdom, a little love, a little sympathy, and power of companionship—everything that we ought to have mutually.'
'Do you mean that I didn't love you enough, or didn't know my own mind?'
'But surely marriage is the sort of bargain which needs two to make it?'
'Well, at any rate you refused me out and out then, and you were as solemn as if you were going into a convent. Larry always declares you were thinking of doing it then. I know you had a picture of the Virgin, and said she was our advocate, and talked about the soul and all sorts of Papist things—enough to make a Protestant's hair creep.'
'Did your hair creep? And how did you know you were a Protestant? Because you never go to church, I suppose?'
'That's neither here nor there. But now, do you remember the second time I asked you?'
A quick wave of colour swept over the girl's face.
'Ted, what is the use of going over all this?'