"You ought to behave as if you cared!" said Mary.
Guy Firminger laughed, but he looked worried and he evidently was puzzled. "You must act as if you had jilted me."
"You're not the sort of person unfortunately that people jilt."
Lord Beaupré appeared to accept this statement as incontestable; not with elation however, but with candid regret, the slightly embarrassed recognition of a fundamental obstacle. "Well, it's no one's business, at any rate, is it?"
"No one's, and that's what I shall say if people question me. Besides," Mary added, "they'll see for themselves."
"What will they see?"
"I mean they'll understand. And now we had better join mamma."
It was his evident inclination to linger in the room after he had said this that gave her complete alarm. Mrs. Gosselin was in another room, in which she sat in the morning, and Mary moved in that direction, pausing only in the hall for him to accompany her. She wished to get him into the presence of a third person. In the hall he joined her, and in doing so laid his hand gently on her arm. Then looking into her eyes with all the pleasantness of his honesty, he said: "It will be very easy for me to appear to care—for I shall care. I shall care immensely!" Lord Beaupré added smiling.
Anything, it struck her, was better than that—than that he should say: "We'll keep on, if you like (I should!) only this time it will be serious. Hold me to it—do; don't let me go; lead me on to the altar—really!" Some such words as these, she believed, were rising to his lips, and she had an insurmountable horror of hearing them. It was as if, well enough meant on his part, they would do her a sort of dishonour, so that all her impulse was quickly to avert them. That was not the way she wanted to be asked in marriage. "Thank you very much," she said, "but it doesn't in the least matter. You will seem to have been jilted—so it's all right!"
"All right! You mean—?" He hesitated, he had coloured a little: his eyes questioned her.