“Oh, but I do,” she stammered.
He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I’m afraid my little friend isn’t quite as staunch as I fancied. It doesn’t matter. Perhaps some day you’ll know me better.”
“It wasn’t anything like that. It was just that I—I thought mother wouldn’t like it,” simpered Elsie. “It didn’t seem to me to be quite right.”
“It would have been quite right, or I shouldn’t have asked you to do it,” he replied firmly. “I’m a man of great experience, Elsie, a good many years older than you are, and you may be quite sure that I should never mislead you. But I see I made a mistake, you are not old enough to have the courage to be unconventional.”
He looked hard at her as he spoke, but Elsie’s vanity was not of the sort to be wounded at the term of which he had made use. She merely drooped her head and looked submissive.
A month later he asked her, in thinly veiled terms, whether she had yet changed her mind.
“I shan’t ever change it,” Elsie declared. “I daresay I’ve sometimes been rather silly, and not as careful as I ought, but I know very well that it wouldn’t do for me to act the way you suggest. Why, you’d never respect me the same way again, if I did!”
She felt that the last sentence was a masterpiece. Williams shrugged his shoulders.
“Come, Elsie, let’s understand one another. You’re not ignorant, a girl like you must have had half a dozen men after her. And then what about that doctor fellow—Woolley?”
“What about him?”