But her eyes were shut, and her brain too.
'I adore your modesty,' she whispered. 'Trust me, trust me. I will love you till death.'
'I'm completely stumped,' exclaimed Dempster.
'Poor dear!' said Miss Jane, mistaking. And, indeed it was pardonable, Dempster's metaphors being usually marked by a curiosa infelicitas.
Here the door opened briskly and Mrs. Cherry, the housekeeper, burst into the room.
'Losh me! Miss Chartres!' she cried, as the pair scrambled to their feet.
'Mrs. Cherry,' said Miss Jane, with great presence of mind, in spite of a distinct tremor in her voice, 'since you have seen, I may as well tell you. Mr. Dempster is going to marry me. But why did you come in without knocking, and what do you want?'
Mrs. Cherry made a dreadful mess of her story. It will be clearer to the reader in a form different from that which she gave to it.
The housekeeper's room was on the ground floor, and directly under Muriel's sitting-room. About half-past nine Mrs. Cherry's gossip, Mrs. Shaw, dropped in for a chat. These two good women were widows of fifty, and whatever their talk began with, it usually ended in laudation of their sainted husbands. The crack reached that stage about ten o'clock on the night of our story, and Mrs. Shaw's panegyric was soon in full blast.
'Maister Shaw,' she said, twiddling her thumbs, 'wis a fine man. The cliverest, godliest, brawest Christian, an' a gentleman though he merrit me. He could write, ay, an' coont, mind ye, for a' the warl' as weel as ony bairn o' fourteen in thae' days when a'body's brats gang to the schule. An' for readin'—losh, wumman!—he would sit glowerin' at a pipper a nicht wi' the interestedest look in his een—sae dwamt-like that ye wad hae' thocht he didna' ken a word.'