“I cannot, I cannot!” she said, beginning to cry helplessly. “How is it possible? You will do something for the poor boy, Oliver?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
She looked at him in bewilderment.
“He is my cousin, certainly,” he said with a touch of sarcasm in his voice, “but, on the whole, I have a good many cousins, and have never committed myself to the idea that I was bound to be general guardian and protector to all the young idiots among them who run their heads against stone walls. I don’t even profess to be a benevolent philanthropist. I have told you before that I will do what I can for Clive on one condition—that Bice marries me. You had better urge her not to keep me too long in suspense. Patience is not my chief virtue.”
“I will, indeed—to-day.”
“Not to-day,” said Oliver, considering. “To-morrow. Say as much as you like about Clive, but do not let her know I have desired you to speak to her. And stay, you had better own that you have borrowed money from me.”
“It will make her so angry,” said Mrs Masters piteously.
“No matter, I wish her to know the fact. You will want more, I suppose, when Bice is my wife, and you will not find me ungenerous.”
He left her crying, but her tears lay very near the surface, and he was not even made uncomfortable by them. It was curious how, in a scene of this sort, all his softness of manner and voice seemed, without any remarkable change, to become frozen or petrified, so as to give the impression that it was in vain to attempt to affect him. He had been disappointed when he came back to find Bice a little further from him than when he had left her, and he was determined to risk everything to put matters on a secure footing. Why should they not marry at once?