“I have tested you, Natalie,” I went on. “I know you are the woman I want as my daughter. It will make me happy to see you outshining them all, as you will. And I’ll make you absolutely independent of Walter—of me, even.”
She was looking at me with glistening eyes. I saw that I had thrilled her through and through. Profoundly to move a human being, one must touch his or her deepest passion—his or her particular form of vanity.
“Won’t you, Natalie?” I pleaded, “won’t you make me happy? Won’t you let me give you what your beauty and refinement demand?”
She looked at me sweetly—a look of surrender.
I knew I had won. Then her eyes were twinkling, and instantly I grasped the reason. We both burst out laughing. It certainly was amusing—a father wooing and winning for his son where all his son’s efforts had made his cause only more hopeless. And throughout, what a quaint reversal of old-established, generally accepted ideas of love and marriage! But—“Other times, other customs!”
“‘You will marry on the sixteenth of April, at noon. Get
yourself ready.’”
I dropped Natalie at Mrs. Kirkby’s and went back to my study. I rang the bell and sent the answering servant for Walter. Presently I looked up from my work—he was standing before me, shifting his eyes from point to point, his body from leg to leg.
“You will marry on the sixteenth of April, at noon,” said I. “Get yourself ready.”
And I dismissed him with a wave of my hand.