Still he studied it. “I see—I see. It’s between you and your father.”
“It’s between him and me—yes. An engagement not again to trouble him.”
Hugh, from his face, might have feared a still greater complication; so he made, as he would probably have said, a jolly lot of this. “Ah, that was nice of you. And natural. That’s all right!”
“No”—she spoke from a deeper depth—“it’s altogether wrong. For whatever happens I must now accept it.”
“Well, say you must”—he really declined not to treat it almost as rather a “lark”—“if we can at least go on talking.”
“Ah, we can at least go on talking!” she perversely sighed. “I can say anything I like so long as I don’t say it to him” she almost wailed. But she added with more firmness: “I can still hope—and I can still pray.”
He set free again with a joyous gesture all his confidence. “Well, what more could you do, anyhow? So isn’t that enough?”
It took her a moment to say, and even then she didn’t. “Is it enough for you, Mr. Crimble?”
“What is enough for me”—he could for his part readily name it—“is the harm done you at our last meeting by my irruption; so that if you got his consent to see me——!”
“I didn’t get his consent!”—she had turned away from the searching eyes, but she faced them again to rectify: “I see you against his express command.”