Another long pause, and then it came unpremeditatedly with a rush.
"Look here, Miss Maclean,—chuck the whole thing, and come back to India with me!"
It was so absolutely unexpected, that for a moment Mona thought it was a joke. "That would be a delightfully simple way of cutting the knot of the difficulty," she said gaily, but before her sentence was finished she saw what he meant. She tried not to see it, not to show that she saw it, but the blood rushed over her face and betrayed her.
"Do come," he said. "Will you? I never cared for any woman as I care for you."
"Oh, Sahib," said Mona, "we cared for each other, but not in that way. You have taught me all I have missed in not having a brother."
She was not sorry for him; she was intensely annoyed at his stupidity. Not for a moment did it occur to her that he might really love her. He liked her, of course, admired her, sympathised with her, at the present moment pitied her; but did he really suppose that a woman might not gladly accept his friendship, admiration, sympathy, even his pity, without wishing to have it all translated into the vulgar tangible coin of an offer of marriage? Was marriage for a woman, like money for a beggar, the sole standard by which all good feeling was to be tried?
She was not altogether at fault in her reading of his mind. The Sahib's sister Lena was engaged to be married, and he had started on his furlough with a vague general idea that if he could fall in love and take a wife back with him to India, it would be a very desirable thing. Such an idea is as good a preventive to falling in love as any that could be devised.
Among the girls he had met, Miss Maclean was undoubtedly facile princeps. In many respects she was cut out for the position; she was one of those women who acquire a lighter hand in conversation as they grow older, and who go on mellowing to a rich matronly maturity. In Anglo-Indian society she would be something entirely new, and three months in her own drawing-room would make a brilliant woman of her.
During all the autumn months, while he was shooting in Scotland, the Sahib had delighted in the thought that he was deliberately keeping away from her, and had delighted still more in the prospect of going "all by himself" to call upon her in London, to see whether the old impressions would be renewed in their full force. He had been bitterly angry and disappointed when he failed to find her at Gower Street, but the failure had gone very far to convince him that he really did love her.
And now had come this curious unexpected meeting at Kirkstoun. "Do you see that—person in the fur cloak?" Mona had said to him when he had dropped in for half an hour on the third day of the bazaar. "Don't be alarmed; I don't mean to introduce you; but that is my cousin. Now you know all that I can tell you." His momentary start and look of incredulity had not been lost upon her; but he had recovered himself in an instant, and had shown sufficient sense not to attempt any remark. And in truth, although he had been surprised and shocked, he had not been greatly distressed. "After all," he had said, "anybody could rake up a disreputable forty-second cousin from some ash-heap or other;" and the existence of such a person, together with Mona's breakdown in her medical career, gave him a pleasant, though unacknowledged, sense of being the knight in the fairy tale who is to deliver the captive princess from all her woes. Moreover, Mona's peculiar circumstances had brought about an intimacy between them that might otherwise have been impossible. He had been admitted into one of the less frequented chambers of her nature, and he said to himself that it was a goodly chamber. It was pleasant to see the colour rise into her cheeks, to hear her breath come quick while she talked to him; and to-night—to-night she looked very beautiful, and no shade of doubt was left on his mind that he loved her.