"I'm afraid you'll have to," she said with bitter decision. "I am not going to marry a man just because he admires my house and garden, and is good enough to appreciate my methods of household management. Good night."
She had shaken his hand coolly and shut the front door from within before he could find a word. He found one as the latch clicked.
"Fool!" he said to himself, and stamped his foot.
Dorothea ran up the stairs two at a time to say the same word to herself in the stillness of her bedroom.
"Fool—fool—fool!" she said. "Why couldn't I have said 'No' quietly? Why did I let him see I was angry? Why should I be angry? It's better to be wanted because you're a good manager than not to be wanted at all. At least, I suppose it is. No—it isn't! it isn't! it isn't! And nothing's any use now. It's all gone. If he'd wanted to marry me when I was young and pretty I could have made him love me. And I was pretty—I know I was—I can remember it perfectly well!"
Her quiet years had taken from her no least little touch of girlish sentiment. The longing to be loved was as keen in her as it had been at twenty. She cried herself to sleep, and had a headache the next day. Also her eyes looked smaller than usual and her nose was pink. She went and sat in the black shade of a yew, and trusted that in that deep shadow her eyes and nose would not make Robert feel glad that she had said "No." She wished him to be sorry. She had put on the prettiest gown she had, in the hope that he would be sorry; then she was ashamed of the impulse; also its pale clear greenness seemed to intensify the pinkness of her nose. So she went back to the trailing grey gown. Her wearing of her best Honiton lace collar seemed pardonable. He would never notice it—or know that real lace is more becoming than anything else. She waited for him in the deep shadow, and it was all the morning that she waited. For he knew the value of suspense, and he had not the generosity that disdains the use of the obvious weapon. He was right so far, that before he came she had had time to wonder whether it was her life's one chance of happiness that she had thrown away. But he drove the knife home too far, for when at last she heard the click of the gate and saw the gleam of flannels through the shrubbery, the anxious questioning, "Will he come?" "Have I offended him beyond recall?" changed at one heart-beat to an almost perfect understanding of his reasons for delay. She greeted him coldly. That he expected. But he saw—or believed he saw—the relief under the coldness—and he brought up his forces for the attack.
"Dear," he said—almost at once—"forgive me for last night. It was true, and if I had expressed it better you'd have understood. It isn't just the house and garden, and the perfect life. It's you! Don't you understand what it is to come back from the world to all this, and you—you—you—the very centre of the star?"
"It's all very well," she said, "but that wasn't what you said last night."
"It's what I meant," said he. "Dear, don't you see how much I want you?"