"Do you know I'm interested about you?" she continued, looking frankly in his face. "For your own sake—a little; for somebody else's—a great deal. Have you never heard of flowers that waste their 'sweetness on the desert air?'"
"And blush unseen?" he replied. "I'm blushing now. Don't you think it's becoming?"
"Do be serious!" she interposed, laying a slim white hand on his sleeve. "I tell you I have your welfare at heart. That's the reason you are here now. If I cannot be happy myself, at least I like to help others. Everybody ought to marry the right person. Don't you think so? You've got a right person. Why don't you marry her?"
Watching him narrowly, she perceived, by the catch of his breath, the quiver of his eyelid, that for all his self-command her thrust had gone straight home.
His was too manly a nature to deny its allegiance.
"Do you think she would have me," said he simply and frankly, "if I was to ask her?"
Mrs. Lushington never liked him better than now. To this worldly, weary, manœuvring woman, there was something inexpressibly refreshing in his unaffected self-depreciation. "What a fool the girl is!" she thought; "why, she ought to jump at him!" But what she said, was—"Qui cherche trouve. If you don't put the question, how can you expect to have an answer? Are you so spoilt, my dear General, that you expect women to drop into your mouth like over-ripe fruit? What we enjoy is, to be worried and teased over and over again, till at last we are bored into saying "Yes" in sheer weariness, and to get rid of the subject. How can you be refused, much more accepted, if you won't even make an offer?"
"Do you know what it is to care for somebody very much?" said he, smoothing his hat with his elbow, as a village-maiden on the stage plaits the hem of her apron. "What you suggest, seems the boldest game, no doubt; but it is like putting all one's fortune on a single throw. Suppose the dice come up against me—can you wonder I am a little afraid to lift the box?"
"I cannot fancy you afraid of anything," she answered with an admiring glance; "not even of failure, though it would probably be a new sensation. You know what Mr. Walters says—(he winced, and she saw it)—'When you go to a fighting-house, you should take a fighting man.' So I say, 'When you are in a tangle about women, ask a woman to get you out of it.' Put yourself in my hands, and when you dress for dinner, you shall be a proud and a happy General!"
His face brightened. "I should be very happy," said he, "I honestly confess, if Miss Douglas would consent to be my wife. Do you advise me to ask her at once?"