“I am,—that is, I was a few moments back. I mean, that whenever I recall the words she spoke to me, I feel their full conviction.”
“Come, now, sit down here beside me! It can scarcely be anything I may not be a party to. Just let me hear the case like a judge in chamber”—and he smiled at an illustration that recalled his favorite passion, “I won't pretend to say my sister has not a wiser head—as I well know she has a far better heart—than myself, but now and then she lets a prejudice or a caprice or even a mere apprehension run away with her, and it's just possible it is some whim of this kind is now uppermost.”
Conyers only shook his head dissentingly, and said nothing.
“Maybe I guess it,—I suspect that I guess it,” said Peter, with a sly drollery about his mouth. “My sister has a notion that a young man and a young woman ought no more to be in propinquity than saltpetre and charcoal. She has been giving me a lecture on my blindness, and asking if I can't see this, that, and the other; but, besides being the least observant of mankind, I'm one of the most hopeful as regards whatever I wish to be. Now we have all of us gone on so pleasantly together, with such a thorough good understanding—such loyalty, as the French would call it—that I can't, for the life of me, detect any ground for mistrust or dread. Have n't I hit the blot, Conyers—eh?” cried he, as the young fellow grew redder and redder, till his face became crimson.
“I assured Miss Barrington,” began he, in a faltering, broken voice, “that I set too much store on the generous confidence you extended to me to abuse it; that, received as I was, like one of your own blood and kindred, I never could forget the frank trustfulness with which you discussed everything before me, and made me, so to say, 'One of you.' The moment, however, that my intimacy suggested a sense of constraint, I felt the whole charm of my privilege would have departed, and it is for this reason I am going!” The last word was closed with a deep sigh, and he turned away his head as he concluded.
“And for this reason you shall not go one step,” said Peter, slapping him cordially on the shoulder. “I verily believe that women think the world was made for nothing but love-making, just as the crack engineer believed rivers were intended by Providence to feed navigable canals; but you and I know a little better, not to say that a young fellow with the stamp gentleman indelibly marked on his forehead would not think of making a young girl fresh from a convent—a mere child in the ways of life—the mark of his attentions. Am I not right?”
“I hope and believe you are!”
“Stay where you are, then; be happy, and help us to feel so; and the only pledge I ask is, that whenever you suspect Dinah to be a shrewder observer and a truer prophet than her brother—you understand me—you'll just come and say, 'Peter Barrington, I'm off; good-bye!'”
“There's my hand on it,” said he, grasping the old man's with warmth. “There's only one point—I have told Miss Barrington that I would start this evening.”
“She'll scarcely hold you very closely to your pledge.”