“No,” laughed Reding; “telegraph wires and detective policemen have been the death and destruction of all gallant enterprises of that sort. Neither do I think such a violent measure would have been necessary in this instance. He could have carried her off with her own consent, and nobody on earth could have prevented that, as they were both of age. Why didn’t you do it, my boy, eh? You haven’t answered that question satisfactorily yet.”
“Because he didn’t dare to!” recklessly interrupted Harpe. “He’s one of the ‘faint hearts’ that will never ‘win fair lady.’ He didn’t dare to.”
“I will answer you in the words of another weak wretch who was stung by sarcasm into crime:
‘I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.’
In other words, Messieurs, I am quite as incapable of running off with another man’s betrothed as I should be in making love to another man’s wife,” said Dick, very gravely.
“Hear! hear! hear!” shouted Harpe; “he wouldn’t run off with another man’s betrothed! oh, no, not he! even when he knows he loves her, and she him! oh, no! no! sooner than he’d make love to another man’s wife. As for me, I’d do either, as often as I could get a chance.”
“Why, man alive,” said Reding to Dick, “we are not in Spain, nor France, nor Germany, nor any other country where betrothal is held to be almost as sacred as marriage; we are in America, where betrothal means simply a conditional engagement between a young man and young woman to marry each other at a definite or indefinite time, provided in the meanwhile neither party should happen to meet with any one he or she likes better. Bosh! such engagements don’t end in marriage once in ten times! Under the circumstances, I don’t think you were bound to respect the betrothal.”
“I differ with you,” said Dick.
“As for me,” put in Harpe, defiantly, “I never in all my life fell desperately in love with a woman, until some other man called my attention to her merits by getting possession of her himself.”