"But why, Olivia? Tell me why!"
"You force it from me, word by word," complained the girl.
"Then let me see. I think I begin to see. You like me in myself almost well enough to marry me. Well, thank God for that much! But you don't want to marry the Duke of St. Osmund's, because you're mortally afraid of what people will say. You think they'll say you're doing it for the main chance. And so they will—and so they may! They wouldn't say it, and you wouldn't think it, of any other man in my position; no, it's because I'm not fit for my billet, that's how it is! Not fit for it, and not fit for you; so they'd naturally think you were marrying me for what I'd got, and that you couldn't bear. Ah, yes, I see hard enough; it's as plain as a pikestaff now!"
The girl saw, too; with the unconscious bluntness of a singularly direct nature, he had stripped her scruples bare, and their littleness horrified Olivia. The moral cowardice of her hesitation came home to her with an insupportable pang, and her mind was made up before his last sentences put her face in flames.
"You are wrong," she could only murmur; "oh, you are dreadfully wrong!"
"I am right," he answered bitterly, "and you are right. No wonder you dread the hard things that would be said of you! Take away the name and the money, and what am I? A back-block larrikin—a common stockman!"
"The man for me," said Olivia hoarsely.
"Ah, yes, if I were not such a public match!"
"Whatever you are—whatever you may be—if you want me still——"
"Want you! I have wanted you from the first. I shall want you till the last!"