“All light, I will not. Always ready to obey you, Gertie, because I want to show you that I really love you very dearly.”
Gertrude gave a hurried glance at the door, remembered the dog, and grew calm.
“I’m not going to frighten you, Gertie,” continued Saul, “but I want for us to understand our position. Never mind what the executors or any one else says, George Harrington is not coming back. He’s dead or he would have been here.”
“He has not had time yet. He was in the West—Far West, last time my uncle heard.”
“I don’t care if he was in the much farther West. Letters would have reached him, and he would have known that his grandfather was dead, and if he had known it, do you think the man is living who would not have rushed over to secure this property?”
Gertrude felt her heart sink. Not many minutes before she had felt a dread of meeting George Harrington; now that there was a possibility of Saul’s words being true, a curious feeling of sorrow attacked her, and she felt that she would give anything for the man, whose praises the old man had sung, to take her by the hand.
“Well, you might talk,” continued Saul. “I’m not going to bother you, nor to hurry things. I know I’m right. There is no George Harrington, and you are going to be my wife.”
“No, no,” cried Gertrude hastily.
“And I say yes, yes, so don’t be silly. Better than being married to a man you have never seen—some whiskey-drinking, loafing rowdy from the States, who would have ill-used you, degraded you, spent every penny the old man left, and then gone back to America, and left you to starve, if you were not already dead of a broken heart.”
Gertrude listened in silence, wondering at the strange feeling of indignation within her, and the desire to take up the cudgels on George Harrington’s behalf.