"To say to you something so special and particular, that your answer to it may change the course of my whole life. I must ask you to listen to me, Miss Stafford. I won't keep you a minute longer than I can help."
Daisy bowed her head in acquiescence. She had taken a seat, but he remained standing before her, half leaning over towards her, with one hand on the table.
Poor John Merton! The girl's eyes rested on that hand, with its great thick red fingers and coarse knuckles and clumsy wrist; and then they travelled up the shiny sleeve of his black coat, and over his blue silk gold-sprigged tie to his good-looking face shining with soap, and his jet-black hair glistening with grease. And then she dropped her eyes, and inwardly shuddered, comparing them with the hands and features of two other people of her acquaintance.
"You said just now," said John Merton, in rather a husky voice, "that you were not annoyed at my calling upon you, because you had known me so long, and because you were so intimate with my sister. I think I might allege those two reasons as the cause of my being here now. All the time I have known you I have had but one feeling towards you, and all that I have heard my sister say of you--and she seems never to be talking of anybody else--has deepened and concentrated that feeling. What that feeling is," continued John, "I don't think I need try to explain. I don't think I could if I tried, unless--unless I were to say that I would lay down my life to save you from an ache or a pain, that I worship the very ground you tread on, and that I look upon you like an angel from heaven!"
His voice shook as he said these words; but the fervour which possessed him lit up his features; and as Daisy stole an upward glance at him, and saw his pleading eyes and working mouth, she forgot the homeliness of his appearance, and wondered how her most recent thoughts about him had ever found a place in her mind.
He caught something of her feeling, and said quickly, "You are not angry with me?"
She shook her head in dissent.
"You mustn't be that," he said, "whatever answer you may give me. I know how inferior I am to you in every possible way. I know, I can't help knowing, I could not help hearing even at that girl's the other evening, the last time we met, how you were noticed and admired by people in a very different position from mine: have known this and borne it all, and never spoken--shouldn't have spoken now, but that there is come a chance in my life which I must either accept or relinquish, and I want you to decide it for me."
"You want me to decide it!"
"You, and you alone can do it. This is how it comes about, Miss Stafford. You know I am what they call a 'counterjumper,'" said he, with a little bitter laugh; "but I know, that though it is a distinction without a difference, I suppose, to those who are not in the trade, I am one of the first hands with perhaps the largest silk-mercers in London, and I have been taken frequently abroad by one of the firm when he has gone to buy goods in a foreign market. I must have pleased them, I suppose, for now they are going to set up an agency in Lyons; and they have offered it to me, and I shall take it if you will come with me as my wife."