"Heavens!" he cried, "you talk of marriage as though it were a contract between two shop-keepers to be argle-bargled over. It's an affair of the heart, not of the head. Ye've never loved me," he said bitterly, "or ye'd know that."
"That may be true," Nancy answered, mutinously. "I have tried to be fair to you, however, and not to let you have a wife who didn't know her own mind. I am, as you reminded me, different from other women in many ways. I like many——"
"I've noted that," he interrupted with scant courtesy.
"And I'm afraid I shall continue to like them for one thing or another till the end; and you're of a jealous turn, Danvers," she said, coldly.
"I have been," he said. "Where you were concerned I haven't a generous thought. I take shares in my wife with no man. I have been jealous of the sound of your voice, the glance of your eye. What I have had to endure because of this ye must surely have seen! When a woman loves a man she has no thought for another——"
"It's may be so," Nancy broke in, "but it's as entirely beyond me as flying. If I loved you with all there is of me, and another came by with a bit of a rhyme, or a new tale, or a plan quite of his own thinking, the chances are many that you'd be clear out of my mind while he stayed."
"'Tis fortunate, as you say," he interrupted, "that we discover this before 'tis too late. I think it's a peculiarity that will go far to making the husband you take for yourself a very unhappy man."
"He will perhaps understand me better than you do," Nancy answered gently.
"Oh," he cried at this, "can't you see that a woman surrenders herself when she loves? She gives as gladly as a man takes, and is happy to have him for her lord and master. Not that he wishes to rule her, for 'twould be the thought of his life that her every desire should be filled, but she must be willing to yield."
"Ye'd have made a grand Turk," Nancy broke in, and there was a glint of humor in her tone as she spoke the words.