Her tone was not so discouraging as her words. Clifford, who, much to his own surprise, was quite in earnest, pressed his suit with proper eagerness.
“I don’t want to rush you into marrying me,” he said. “Take me on probation. Let it be known that I have asked you to be my wife; give way so far as to become engaged to me; and if, before I go back to town next month, I have bored you so much that you have to break the engagement in disgust, you send me about my business and refuse to receive any letters from me. At any rate, people won’t be able to say unkind things when they know I wanted you to be my wife.”
But Nell persisted.
“I won’t even be engaged to you.”
“Why not? Don’t you like me?”
Although her manner betrayed that she did, Nell stoutly denied it. She wanted to go on with her work, she said, and he had better go back to his friends at Stroan. And he must please consider, as she meant to do, that he had not said any of the silly things to which she had tried not to listen. She should forget them at once, and she hoped he would do the same. And it amused her to think how disgusted his relations and friends would have been if she had really been so silly as to listen to his idle talk, if he had returned to town engaged to an innkeeper’s niece.
“And my own friends,” added the girl, with spirit, “would have been just as disgusted with me for taking advantage of the passing fancy of a man in your position to marry above my own rank in life.”
But to this Clifford answered with great composure:
“You will marry above your own rank, that is certain, whether you marry me or not. Beauty like yours has a rank of its own, to begin with. And as for these wild hordes of relations of mine, they only exist in your imagination. There is no one to prevent me doing as I like; and even if there were, they might try, but they wouldn’t succeed.”
To this Nell made no answer. After a short silence, Clifford spoke again: