'I don't think I've really ever spoken so ungratefully as that about dear old Ballater. It's quite true that I should like to see a little more of the big world outside some day, but I think I could be content to hear what you care to tell me about it for a year or two longer first. The fact is, Mr. Maude,' she went on, looking up at me with an altogether irresistible smile of affection and sympathy, 'I could make up my mind to leave the hills, but I can't make up my mind to leave you.'
What an opening! I began to shiver and quake and to give signs of such unmistakable nervousness that Babiole evidently thought I was going to be taken with a fit of some sort. She looked helplessly around, and I gave a laugh like a schoolboy who comes too early to his first ball.
'I'm not ill, Babiole; I have something to say to you.'
Upon this she became nearly as much disturbed as I, and the colour left her sensitive face, as she sat mutely down on the tree-trunk again to hear me.
'I—don't want you to—go away—either—Babiole,' I jerked out slowly and unsteadily. 'You are very young, and I think you can afford to wait before seeing the world,—if you are not tired of this place and the people in it. Everybody here likes you, I may say, loves you; and, at any rate, if the life is not very exciting, it has no great cares. But your father, who does not know us so well as you do, is reluctant to leave you here without some sort of—of formal guarantee for your safety.' Babiole looked up at me from time to time in bewildered expectancy of something new and awful.
'Safety!' she echoed in an amazed whisper.
'Yes. Girls, when they grow to your age, must have a—a responsible guardian, you know. How old are you?'
'I shall be sixteen in July.'
'Well, you see, in a few years you will be old enough to be married, and your father is naturally anxious to see you well provided for: established, you know, settled—in fact, married.'
Babiole was growing calmer. On reflection, of course there was nothing so alarming in the mention of a woman's natural end as to justify the horror which one is accustomed to consider maidenly; but I was surprised at the time to find that she listened to me so quietly. I thought it would have helped me more if she had shied at the subject, so to speak; some little show of emotion of one kind or another would have spurred me on to make a better business of the whole thing than I was doing. Her eyes, instead of being raised from time to time inquiringly to mine, were now fixed on the last faint glow of sunlight behind the hills; but she said nothing, and I had to go on.