“Can't we—can't we wait about this marrying business?”
“That's just it,” she said gayly. “I said it was too soon. There would be so much to do between whiles. Why not say at the end of the summer?”
“Say what?”
“Our marriage, I mean.”
“Why get married, then? What's the good of all that fuss about it? I don't go anything upon a minister puddling round in my affairs. What's the difference, anyhow? We understand each other. Isn't that enough? Pshaw, Hilma, I'M no marrying man.”
She looked at him a moment, bewildered, then slowly she took his meaning. She rose to her feet, her eyes wide, her face paling with terror. He did not look at her, but he could hear the catch in her throat.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, with a long, deep breath, and again “Oh!” the back of her hand against her lips.
It was a quick gasp of a veritable physical anguish. Her eyes brimmed over. Annixter rose, looking at her.
“Well?” he said, awkwardly, “Well?”
Hilma leaped back from him with an instinctive recoil of her whole being, throwing out her hands in a gesture of defence, fearing she knew not what. There was as yet no sense of insult in her mind, no outraged modesty. She was only terrified. It was as though searching for wild flowers she had come suddenly upon a snake.