"Fourteen times!" Alex was astounded.
According to her preconceived notions a proposal was carefully led up to, uttered at some propitious moment, preferably by moonlight, and then and there either definitely accepted or rejected.
"But I shouldn't have thought you'd even seen her fourteen times," she remarked naïvely.
"I see her every day," Goldstein said gloomily. "It's playing the deuce with my business. You won't give me away, I know—you're her friend, aren't you?—and people are so stupid and conventional, they might talk."
Alex remembered Lady Isabel. Was this what she had meant?
"I can always manage to see her. I know her movements, and when I can meet her, and when I may take her out to lunch or tea—some quiet place, of course."
Alex was puzzled.
"But are you engaged?"
"Yes, a thousand times!" he answered in low, vehement tones, and then appeared to recollect himself. "She has never said no, although I can't induce her to say yes," he admitted; "and I have to see her surrounded and admired everywhere she goes, and have no hold on her whatever. If she would only marry me!" he made a gesture of rather theatrical despair, indicating the far corner where the young Dane still sat, oblivious of everything but Queenie, drooping over the small round table that separated them.
"Cad! he's going to smoke," Goldstein muttered furiously below his breath.