“I would let you,” she said hurriedly. “I’d let you—I’d love you to do all sorts of things for me, Barty. I’d marry you to-morrow, if—”
“If what?” he demanded.
This idea had been so long in her mind, these words had been so often on the tip of her tongue, that now she was going to speak them, whether he liked it or not.
“If you’d just get married—unostentatiously,” she said.
“Unostentatiously?” he repeated. “I don’t know what you mean, Jacko.”
“I mean, just go down to the City Hall and get married, and you go on with your work, and I’ll go on with mine, and we won’t tell any one.”
“Oh!” said he. “You mean secretly, do you?”
He was looking at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. There was a hard, cold look in his gray eyes.
“It’s no use talking about that,” he said curtly, “because I won’t do it.”
But he did. Later on, she remembered that hour with bitter regret and remorse—the hour of her victory and his defeat. She had been unfair, cruelly unfair. She had made use of those tears which he could not endure. She had held out to him the prospect of gaining everything and losing nothing, of having her and yet not alienating Stafford.[Pg 207]