She spoke bitterly, and something in her words and tone shocked Hilary a little. He had none of the love for the original and the unexpected in woman which had probably come to Lord Carthew from his brilliant little American mother. Hilary’s mother was the pretty and graceful daughter of a country clergyman, who had in her youth revelled in lawn-tennis and crewel-work, and whose ideas on all subjects were equally orthodox and limited. Hilary was fond of his mother, and she had heretofore supplied his ideal of femininity; he had not yet had time to adjust his aspirations toward a different standard.
“Do you quite realize what you are doing, I wonder?” he asked her suddenly, turning and taking her face into his hand while he scrutinized it closely, with a half-angry, half-hungry look. “What you are doing, I mean, in throwing over a man like Carthew for the sake of a man like me? He is heir to an earldom; his father is well off, and in a very brilliant position; his mother is extremely wealthy; he distinguished himself so greatly at college that people expect great things of him. While, as for me, the higher education was wasted on me; I was never good for anything but athletics. I am leaving England to rough it in Canada, trying to make a farm pay. I can keep a wife, certainly, upon what I have, but not such a wife as you.”
“Don’t you want me?” she asked, simply, looking him straight in the eyes.
“Want you? Good heavens! I would give my soul for you! But I won’t be played with. By some magic of your own you have made me love you, and you must take the consequences. Stella, I love you, and if you plight me your troth now, I must marry you. If you now, in the face of what I have put before you and what you know, still choose to cling to me, I swear to you that I will marry no woman but you, and that you shall marry no man but me!”
She looked into his face, flushed and excited as it was, his brown eyes shining like her own.
“On my honor, I swear,” she said, solemnly, “that whatever pressure is brought to bear upon me, I will marry no one but you, Hilary Pritchard.”
Their lips met in that interminably long kiss of first love, given and returned, the kiss which comes once in a lifetime to a chosen few, and to many comes never at all—a kiss in which time and space are obliterated, and in which two spirits seem to meet in regions far beyond this work-a-day world of ours.
Moved out of herself, in an ecstasy of emotion, perhaps at the happiest, certainly at the first perfectly happy moment of her life, Stella felt rather than heard a harsh, low-pitched voice, asking for Miss Cranstoun in the hall immediately outside the coffee-room.
She turned instinctively toward Hilary for protection as she whispered:
“It is my father!”