Mrs. Minster seemed to approve the figures. “I never have believed in early marriages,” she said. “They make more than half the trouble there is. The Mauverensens were never great hands for marrying early. My grandfather, Major Douw, was almost thirty, and my father was past that age. And, of course, people married then much earlier than they do nowadays.”
“I hope you do not think twenty-eight too young,” Horace pleaded, with alert eyes resting on her face. He paused only for an instant, and then, just as the tremor arising in his heart had reached his tongue, added earnestly, “For it is a Mauverensen I wish to marry.”
Mrs. Minster looked at him with no light of comprehension in her glance. “It can’t be our people,” she said, composedly, “for Anthony has no daughters. It must be some of the Schenectady lot. We’re not related at all. They try to make out that they are, but they’re not.”
“You are very closely and tenderly related to the young lady I have learned to adore,” the young man said, leaning forward on his low chair until one knee almost touched the carpet. “I called her a Mauverensen because she is worthy of that historic blood, but it was her mother’s, not her father’s name. Mrs. Minster, I love your daughter Kate!”
“Goodness me!” was the astonished lady’s comment.
She stared at the young man in suppliant attitude before her, in very considerable confusion of thought, and for what seemed to him an intolerable time.
“I am afraid it wouldn’t do at all,” she said first, doubtingly. Then she added, as if thinking aloud: “I might have known Kate was keeping something from me. She hasn’t been herself at all these last few weeks.”
“But she has not been keeping this from you, Mrs. Minster,” urged the young man, in his softest voice. “It is my own secret—all my own—kept locked in the inner tabernacle of my heart until this very moment, when I revealed it to you.”
“You mean that Kate—my daughter—does not know of this?”
“She must know that I worship the ground she treads on—she would be blind not to realize that—but I have never said a word to her about it. No, not a word!”