“Yes, that’s just what I would have had you say! At least, perhaps it would have been uncomfortable to say it to him, but I wish to Heaven you’d say it to me.”
Miss Eden shook her head gently.
“That’s not the sort of thing one does in a hurry,” she said. “I don’t know much about you, Mr Bayre.”
“You know a great deal more about me than you do about that amiable pink elephant your guardian chose for you. Yet you were ready, or half ready, to marry him even before you had seen him.”
“Ah, well, that was a different thing. That would have been a marriage of arrangement, in the French fashion, while the other—”
She checked herself, but it was too late. Bayre beamed all over his pale face as he made her stop, and whispered eagerly,—
“Say it, yes, say it. The other—would have been a marriage of inclination?”
But she would not answer him.
“Look, Nini’s dropping my bag!” she suddenly cried.
And with an adroit movement she ran past her companion, and waving him a farewell with her hand, reached Nini’s side and went on without looking back again.