“In his own style. ‘Lord Minster,’ I said, ‘I am, for the third time, honoured by your flattering proposal, but I have no wish to ornament your table, no desire to expose my beauty to your perpetual admiration, and no ambition to advance your political career. I do not love you, and I had rather become the wife of a crossing-sweeper that I loved, than that of a member of the government for whom I have every respect, but no affection.’
“‘As the wife of a crossing-sweeper, it is probable,’ he answered, ‘that you would be miserable. As my wife, you would certainly be admired and powerful, and consequently happy.’
“‘Lord Minster,’ I said, ‘you have studied human nature but very superficially, if you have not learnt that it is better for a woman to be miserable with the man she loves, than “admired, powerful, and consequently happy,” with one who has no attraction for her.’
“‘Your remark is interesting,’ he replied; ‘but I think that there is something paradoxical about it. I must be going now, as I have only five minutes to get to Westminster; but I will think it over, and answer it when we renew our conversation, which I propose to do very shortly,’ and he was gone before I could get in another word.”
“But why should that make you go to Madeira?”
“Because, my dear, if I don’t, so sure as I am a living woman, that man will tire me out and marry me, and I dislike him, and don’t want to marry him. I have a strong will, but his is of iron.”
And so it came to pass that the names of Mrs. Carr, Miss Terry, and three servants, appeared upon the passenger list of Messrs. Donald Currie & Co.‘s royal mail steamship Warwick Castle, due to sail for Madeira and the Cape ports on the 14th of June.
CHAPTER XXXII.
Arthur arrived in town in a melancholy condition. His was a temperament peculiarly liable to suffer from attacks of depression, and he had, with some excuse, a sufficiently severe one on him now. Do what he would he could not for a single hour free his mind from the sick longing to see or hear from Angela, that, in addition to the mental distress it occasioned him, amounted almost to a physical pain. After two or three days of lounging about his club—for he was in no mood for going out—he began to feel that this sort of thing was intolerable, and that it was absolutely necessary for him to go somewhere or do something.
It so happened that, just after he had come to this decision, he overheard two men, who were sitting at the next table to him in the club dining-room, talking of the island of Madeira, and speaking of it as a charming place. He accepted this as an omen, and determined that to Madeira he would go. And, indeed, the place would suit him as well as any other to get through a portion of his year of probation in, and, whilst affording a complete change of scene, would not be too far from England.