"Will you not congratulate me?" he said, looking from one to the other of us.
"Is she willing to marry you?" his father asked, with exaggerated amazement.
"If she finds none whom she fancies more, she said she would marry me within the year——"
"Well, well, there's some hope for you," Sandy went on. "She may meet in with some one else."
"You've my pity," I laughed, but I took his hand in mine with the words.
His joy radiated itself to us, and his talk was just as it should be for his years. He patronized us a bit for being older and out of the way of it all, spoke of Nancy as though she were the only woman since Eve, and discussed a betrothal ring as though it were a thing for empires to rise and fall by.
"She fancies rubies; she cares for gems, you know," he said, as though the information was new to us instead of having been anciently and expensively bought.
He must have the best ruby in Scotland, he went on. He wished he could attend to the matter himself. "But," he stood with his thumbs in the arms of his waistcoat as he spoke, with a conscious smile—"but no fellow would be such a bally ass as to dash to London for a ring under present conditions." There were the four thousand pounds his grandmother had given him. They might all be spent for this. There was a fellow named Billy Deuceace, an Oxford man, with taste in such matters. He would write him concerning it to-night, he said.
"Faith," said Sandy, drolly, "you talk as if married life were all a ring. Ye'll find it different when your wife has the genius and is taken up wi' other men."
And Danvers faced the two of us here by a statement which has never left me from the night he uttered it till the minute of my setting it down.