“You’re going to marry Miss Claire, aren’t you?”
Christian, who always took things more easily than his deeper-natured companion, looked at the earnest, strongly-cut face with something like amusement. Luckily, it was too dark for Bram to see the full significance of his companion’s expression.
“Marry her? Why, yes, to be sure I hope so. My father is very anxious for me ‘to settle down,’ as he calls it, though I would rather, for my own part, not settle down quite so far as matrimony just yet.”
There was a pause. Then Bram said in a dry voice—
“I can’t understand you, Mr. Christian. You seem just as nigh what a man ought to be as a man can be in lots of ways. And I can’t understand how a man like that, that is a man like you, shouldn’t be all on fire to make the girl he loves his wife as quick as he can. Is that a part of my priggishness, Mr. Christian, to wonder at that?”
Christian did not answer at once. They had reached the top of the hill, and were standing by the ruined cottages, which looked more desolate than ever in the darkness of the winter evening. The wind whistled through the broken walls and the decaying rafters.
Bram remembered the evening when he had heard Christian’s laugh in that very pile.
“I suppose it is, Bram,” said Chris at last. “But I rather like it in you, all the same. I can’t help laughing at you, but I think you’re rather a fine fellow. Now, listen to me. You may go on wondering at my behavior as much as you like, but you mustn’t yourself have anything more to do with the Birons. We’ll say I’m jealous, Bram, if you like. I really think it’s true, too,” he added with a flippancy which belied his words.
But Bram shook his head solemnly.