“Pray,—pray, dear Aunt, do be careful. Listen to Mr. Mervyn.”
“Listen to him yourself!” cried the old lady, who hardly for her life could have forborne the quip and the confusion it occasioned her niece. It gave less point to the moment when she flustered out of the room, and Mervyn, hastily bestirring himself to hand her to the door which her maid ran to open, turned with a sense of infinite relief toward the fire.
He wondered at himself afterward. He knew that he had but a moment; that Arabella’s poise was already shaken by the events of the evening; that there were days to come when occasion would offer a more propitious opportunity for solitude à deux. He could not resist her aspect; he could no longer deny himself the bliss of merging expectation in certainty.
He crossed the hearth and stood by her side. He saw the surprise in her eyes; the flush flutter in her cheek; the tense lifting of her figure into an added stateliness, an obvious pride. She looked a very queen as she turned her head—and after all, he was the suitor.
“And will you listen?”—he said, catching the phrase. “Will you let me tell you how I worship you—how I worship you, how every glance of your eye and every turn of your head and every intonation of your voice is almost sacred to me? It hardly seems a sacrilege to say I could fall at your feet and adore you. And will you look kindly on my suit? And will you hear my humble prayer? And will you reward my devotion? Will you be my wife?”
He had acquitted himself very prettily, and with a rare interpretation of her state of mind. She had begun to like him well, but it was not enough that she should like him. His phrase-making fed her pride. He had much to offer, and he offered his abundance in great abasement.
As she slowly lifted her eyes they met his; and he went on without waiting for a reply. “I wonder at my courage in speaking at all,” he said. “It seems impossible that you should care—or that you should come in time to care for me.”
He paused, and in the tenseness of the silence the beat of the rain on the roof had an inimical suggestion as if in its turbulence it might come flying in at them. The thunder rolled and the echoes followed with hollow reverberations hardly less resonant. The lightnings flickered over her face and figure, and she visibly quailed a little, and he drew nearer.
“When you asked me to take care of you—the other day—I could scarcely keep from begging for that privilege forever. It would be my blessed and sacred duty—it would be my life’s crown. No behest on earth can be so dear to me as those words. But let it be forever.”
There was continued silence.