“No, please don’t,” she said. “I don’t want you to say any more. I hoped you would see it wasn’t any use. I’m sorry.”
The curate although a vain man, had never felt very confident of winning her. He wanted her quite urgently; but he was not so deeply in love with Prudence as he was with himself, and the certainty of defeat wounded his pride more than it wounded his feelings. He had no intention of giving her the satisfaction of being in a position to say that she had refused him. He dissembled meanly, congratulating himself on the clever ambiguity with which he had worded his proposal.
“I am sorry you have formed that opinion,” he said, trying to keep the chagrin he felt from betraying itself in his voice. “You are so much with her that I believed you would enjoy her entire confidence, and I was vain enough to expect a little encouragement. But I am not going to accept your opinion as final. I shall make my appeal to her. Perhaps I ought to have done so in the first instance; but a man feels naturally diffident at these times.”
The play of expression on Prudence’s face while she listened to his stilted sentences was remarkable. He would have been very obtuse if he believed that he succeeded in deceiving her. It was very evident that she apprehended him very clearly. A little smile hovered about her mouth when she replied to him.
“If it is Matilda you allude to,” she said, with an ambiguity equal to his own, “I wish you all the success you deserve.”
He raised his hat gravely and left her, carrying the bag of sweets with him, to the manifest disgust of the staring infants; and Prudence, watching his hurrying little figure making its purposeful way through the different groups in search of his unconscious quarry, laughed quietly and without malice, despite his ungenerous effort to humiliate her.
“Now I shall have a new enemy in my brother-in-law,” she reflected. “He is marrying the chimneys. But Matilda will be too grateful to him to resent that.”
Matilda was grateful. She was sufficiently overcome with the honour thus conferred on her to satisfy even Mr Jones’ colossal vanity. Mr Jones accepted his triumph with becoming condescension; to describe his air as elated would be misleading. His manner towards his affianced wife, who was several years his senior, and had never been handsome, was benevolently patronising. His courtship was business-like, and free from those affectations of silly sentiment so unsuited to his calling. If Miss Matilda regretted the lack of lover-like attentions, she concealed her disappointment, clinging insistently to the belief that everything that Ernest did was right and dignified. It would have been unbecoming in a clergyman to be demonstrative.
“I used to think,” she confessed to Prudence in a moment of rare confidence, “that it was you he admired. You remember how he used to persist in accompanying us on our walks, and how he talked principally with you? All the while he was thinking of me. He told me so. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“He has the sense,” Prudence answered, and kissed the flushed face kindly, “to realise that you will make the best wife in the world for a clergyman.”