Margery stood and looked at him with wide-open eyes. “Do you mean to say,” she said, “that you want to marry me? It would take years and years for you to become naturalist enough to support a wife.”
“I have made no plans,” he said, quickly, “I have no purpose. I did not intend to tell you now that I love you, but since I have said that, I will say also that with you to fight for there could be no doubt about my success. I should be bound to succeed. It would be impossible for me to fail. As for the years, I would wait, no matter how many they should be.”
He spoke with such hot earnestness that Margery involuntarily drew herself a little away from him. At this the flush went out of his face.
“Oh, Miss Dearborn,” he exclaimed, “don’t think that I am like that man out there! Don’t think that I will persecute you if you don’t wish to hear me; that I will follow you about and make your life miserable. If you say to me that you do not wish to see me again, you will never see me again. Say what you please, and you will find that I am a gentleman.”
She could see that now. She felt sure that if she told him she did not wish ever to see him again he would never appear before her. But what would he do? She was not in the least afraid of him, but his fierce earnestness frightened her, not for herself, but for him. Suddenly a thought struck her.
“Martin,” said she, “I don’t doubt in the least that what you have said to me about yourself is true. You are as good as other people, although you do happen now to be a guide, and perhaps after a while you may be very well off; but for all that you are a guide, and you are in Mr. Sadler’s employment, and Mr. Sadler’s rights and powers are just like gas escaping from a pipe: they are everywhere from cellar to garret, so to speak, and you couldn’t escape them. It would be a bad, bad thing for you, Martin, if he were to hear that you make propositions of the kind you have made to the ladies that he pays you to take out into the woods to guide and to protect.”
Martin was on the point of a violent expostulation, but she stopped him.
“Now I know what you are going to say,” she exclaimed, “but it isn’t of any use. You are in his employment, and you are bound to honor and to respect him; that is the way a guide can show himself to be a gentleman.”
“But suppose,” said Martin, quickly, “that he, knowing my family as he does, should think I had done wisely in speaking to you.”
A cloud came over her brow. It annoyed her that he should thus parry her thrust.