"Nonsense!" she said. "Any friend would have done as much who had the power. It's nothing to make a fuss about. I'm glad you're out of the scrape, and there's an end to it."
"You were always generous," he exclaimed. "You ought to have been a man; I've said so a hundred times—only it's lucky you're not, or I couldn't ask you a question that I don't know how to put in the right form."
She turned pale as death. It was come, then, at last—that moment to which she had once looked forward as a glimpse of happiness too exquisite for mortal senses. Here was the enchanted cup pressed to her very lip, and she must not taste it—must even withdraw her eyes from the insidious drink. And yet even now she felt a certain sense of disappointment in her empty triumph, a vague misgiving that the proffered draught was flatter than it should be, as if the bottle had been already opened to slake another's thirst.
"Better not ask," she said, "if the words don't come naturally,—if the answer is sure to be no."
In his intense relief he never marked the piteous tone of her voice, nor the tremble of agony passing over her face, like the flicker of a fire on a marble bust, to leave its features more fixed and rigid than before.
Even in her keen suffering she wished to spare him. Already she was beginning to long for the dull insensibility that must succeed this hour of mental conflict, as bodily numbness is the merciful result of pain. She dreaded the possibility that his disappointment should be anything like her own, and would fain have modified the blow she had no choice but to inflict.
Daisy, however, with good reason no doubt, was resolved to rush on his fate the more obstinately, as it seemed, because of the endeavours to spare both him and herself.
"I am a plain-spoken fellow," said he, "and—and—tolerably straightforward, as times go. I'm not much used to this kind of thing—at least, I've never regularly asked such a question before. You mustn't be offended, Miss Douglas, if I don't go the right way to work. But—but—it seems so odd that you should have come in and paid my debts for me! Don't you think I ought—or don't you think you ought—in short, I've come here on purpose to ask you to marry me. I'm not half good enough, I know, and lots of fellows would make you better husbands, I'm afraid. But, really now—without joking—won't you try?"
He had got into the spirit of the thing, and went on more swimmingly than he could have hoped. There was almost a ring of truth in his appeal, for Daisy's was a temperament that flung itself keenly into the excitement of the moment, gathering ardour from the very sense of pursuit. As he said himself, "He never could help riding, if he got a start."
And Miss Douglas shook in every limb while she listened with a wan, weary face and white lips, parted in a rigid smile. It was not that she was unaccustomed to solicitations of a like nature; whatever might be her previous experience, scarcely an hour had passed since she sustained a similar attack—and surely to accept an offer of marriage ought to be more subversive of the nervous system than to refuse; yet she could hardly have betrayed deeper emotions had she been trembling in the balance between life and death.