"No! how can I? It seems so long ago."
"You said a pack of nonsense." As he blurted out this charge Mason turned his head round obliquely, still regarding Barbara.
"Did I? That's just like me," Barbara answered, with a little laugh.
"No, it isn't like you," he replied, almost rudely. "You're the most sensible woman I ever knew, except on one subject."
"What's that?" Barbara was startled by the vehemence and abruptness of his speech, and she asked this in a half-frightened voice.
"Your pride. I looked up to you then, as I do now. You're something above me—I just worship you." To a man of maturity this sort of talk seems extravagant enough. But one must let youth paint itself as it will, with all its follies on its head. You've said sillier things than that in your time, sober reader—you know you have!
"I do just worship you, Barbara Grayson," Hiram went on; "but you talked a parcel of fool stuff that night about the superiority of my family, and about your not being able to bear it that my people should look down on you, and—well, a pack of tomfoolery; that's what it was, Barbara, and there's no use of calling it anything else."
Barbara was silent.
"Now, I'm not going to give you a chance to make any more such speeches. But I want to ask you whether, if I should send you a letter from my mother when I get home, and maybe from my sisters too, after I have told them the whole truth, urging you to accept me and become one of our family—I want to know whether, then, you would be willing; whether you'd take pity on a poor fellow who can't get along without you. Would that suit you?"
"No, it wouldn't," said Barbara, looking at the now blazing chips in the fire-place with her head bent forward.