“But I can't think Uncle Charles would like it if you did,” objected Antonia.
“You'll find he's bearing up quite well,” replied Giles. “Will you marry me, Tony?”
She looked anxiously at him. “Are you utterly serious, Giles?” He nodded. “Because you know what a beast I can be, and it would be so awful if - if you were only proposing to me in a weak moment, and - and I accepted you, and then you regretted it.”
“I'll tell you a secret,” he said. “I love you.”
Antonia suddenly dragged one of his hands to her check. “Oh, darling. Giles, I've only just realised it, but I've been in love with you for years and years and years!” she blurted out.
It was at this somewhat inopportune moment that Rudolph Mesurier burst hurriedly into the studio. “I came as soon as I possibly could!” he began, and then checked, and exclaimed in an outraged voice: “Well, really! I must say!”
Antonia, quite unabashed, went, as usual, straight to the point. She got up, and held out the ring. “You're just the person I wanted to see,” she said naively. “Giles says I must give this back to you. I'm terribly sorry, Rudolph, but - but Giles wants me to marry him. And he knows me awfully well, and we get on together, so - so I think I'd better, if you don't mind very much.”
Mesurier's expression was more of astonishment than of chagrin, but he said in a dramatic voice: “I might have known. I might have known I was living in a fool's paradise.”
“Well, it's jolly nice of you to put it like that,” said Antonia, “but did you really think it was paradise? I rather got the idea that most of the time you thought it pretty hellish. I don't blame you a bit if you did, because as a matter of fact I thought it was fairly hellish myself.”
This frank admission threw Rudolph momentarily out of his stride, but after a few seconds' pained discomfiture, he said with a good deal of bitterness: “I can't grasp it yet. I expect I shall presently. Just now I feel merely numb. I don't seem able to realise that everything is over.”