“Let me remember,” she said, “I am to see that you have—what was it? Oh! liqueurs. We haven’t much choice; you will find Kummel and Chartreuse on the sideboard, and Benedictine, which my uncle hates, by the bye, at your elbow.”
“No liqueurs, thanks,” he said. “I wonder, did you expect me to-night? I don’t think that I ought to have come, ought I?”
“Well, you certainly show,” she answered with a smile, “a remarkable disregard for all precedents and conventions. You ought to be already on your way to foreign parts with your guns and servants. It is Englishmen, is it not, who go always to the Rocky Mountains to shoot bears when their love affairs go wrong?”
He was watching her closely, and he saw that she was less at her ease than she would have had him believe. He saw, too, or fancied that he saw, a softening in her face, a kindliness gleaming out of her lustrous eyes which suggested new things to him.
“The Rocky Mountains,” he said slowly, “mean despair. A man does not go so far whilst he has hope.”
She did not answer him; he gathered courage from her silence.
“Perhaps,” he said, “I might now have been on my way there but for a somewhat sanguine disposition—a very strong determination, and,” he added more softly, “a very intense love.”
“It takes,” she remarked, “a very great deal to discourage an Englishman.”
“Speaking for myself,” he answered, “I defy discouragement; I am proof against it. I love you so dearly, Helène, that I simply decline to give you up; I warn you that I am not a lover to be shaken off.”