At this point a rat put in an appearance at the side of the door and rushed out through the open window.
“Was it for this you asked me to come here?” cried Amber, bravely ignoring what other girls might have regarded as a legitimate interruption of the scene. “Yes, you asked me to come here in order to make your absurd proposal to me. You should be ashamed of yourself, when you knew so well that I thought of our friendship as wholly disinterested. If I had, for one moment——”
“I thought you saw it coming,” said he hanging his head.
“What coming?”
“This.”
“You have given me a blow, Guy—I thought that you were a sincere friend.”
“So I was—I am. But I can’t help loving you all the same. Great Queen of Sheba, you don’t fancy that what you call Platonic friendship can go on beyond a certain point. It’s all very well for a beginning; it makes a good enough basis for a start—but, hang it all, you don’t think that a chap with any self-respect would be content—when there’s a pretty girl like you—the prettiest and the dearest girl that ever lived—— Who the mischief is bawling out there?”
“They are calling to me from the launch,” said Amber. “It is just as well. Guy, I am not angry—only disappointed. You have disappointed me. I thought that you at least—they are getting impatient. I must go.”
She hastened away to the open window and he followed her with a face of melancholy so congenial with the prevailing note of the house that an artist would have been delighted to include him in a picture of “The Gables from the River.”
She ran through the long grass and reached the launch so breathless that she could with difficulty explain that she had been watching a rat.