"What is the matter with him?" demanded Gibson. "It isn't his money. No, nor his horses. Perhaps it's his looks?"
"We'd better be going!" I whispered to Ruddington, behind our bush.
"No, no," protested Susan, "it isn't his looks. When I put him in that folding frame, facing Miss Langley, they looked lovely--just like Royalty. No, it isn't his looks. I could put up with that."
"Then what is it you can't put up with?" asked Gibson searchingly.
She scraped the ground with her foot, as she used to scrape the garden gravel, before she replied mysteriously:
"Tom, he's so funny. He's all twists and turns. It'd be like being married to an eel. If he's the same as his letters, he'd make me all giddy. When I read them, everything seems to begin turning and turning round."
Gibson snorted impatiently. "With a thousand pound a week," he said ironically, "you'll soon get used to that."
"Tom, don't, don't!" she cried. "How can you be so cruel? If you cared about me as you said you did, you wouldn't let nobody have me but you--not if it was the Prince of Wales crawling on his bended knees."
Gibson came more into the light. I could read in his face the bitterness of his heart.
"Susie," he said, "what's the use of talking? If I take you away to-night, you know you'll have to marry me, even if you change your mind before to-morrow morning. Unless there's some good reason why you won't marry Lord Ruddington, you'll repent of it when we're poor and when we've to work hard for a living. You'll throw it in my teeth, and we shall be worse'n a cat and a dog."